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WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? Crown 8vo, 

$1.50 net. 
PAY-DAY. Crown 8vo, $1.50 net. 
THE LIGHTED LAMP, izmo, $1.35 «e*. 
JOHN PERCYFIELD. i 2 mo, jSi.35^. 
THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE. Crown 

8vo, $1.30 net. 
EDUCATION AND THE LARGER LIFE. Crown 

8vo, $1.30 net. 

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 
Boston and New York 



WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 



v*V 



COPYRIGHT, 1914, BY C. HANFORD HENDERSON 



ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 



Published June 1Q14 



JUN 18 I J 14 

©CU37447G 

ho t 



TO MY BROTHER 



PREFACE 

Some twelve years ago, that is to say, in 1902, 
I published a little book, called Education and the 
Larger Life. I put it out with some hesitation, not 
because I doubted its truthfulness, but because, on the 
contrary, it seemed to me so very obvious and so gen- 
eral. The success of the book was a surprise both to 
the publishers and to me. And what is more surpris- 
ing, the book still continues to sell and to be read. Its 
success is quite beyond what I had supposed to be its 
merit. I could wish that it might sooner have been su- 
perseded by a book, certainly not less fresh and inspir- 
ing in its tone, but distinctly less obvious and general, 
distinctly more specific and mature. I had hoped, in- 
deed, for such a sequel, regarding my own little book 
merely as a preface to what was then somewhat crudely 
called, for want of a better name, the New Education. 

But that earlier hope has not been realized. Yet 
there seems to me a genuine need for just such a book ; 
and if I may judge from the continued sale of Educa- 
tion and the Larger Life, there is also a demand. I 
have therefore decided, before old age comes, to attempt 
such a sequel ; and that is, very briefly, the raison 
d'etre and purpose of the present book. It is my desire 
to be as concrete and practical as I can possibly be. I 
want to be of material, genuine help to both parents 
and teachers, and this, not only in the matter of aiding 
them to avoid out-and-out mistakes in the upbringing 
of the children whom Providence has, perhaps rashly, 



viii PREFACE 

committed to their care, but more constructively to offer 
such aid as I am able in the actual day-by-day work of 
education. 

Parents have one indisputable advantage over teach- 
ers, and particularly teachers of the bachelor type. 
They come into more intimate relations with the little 
people, and the great love, which normally fills their 
hearts, brings with it a corresponding insight not al- 
ways vouchsafed to those who have not known the ex- 
perience of parenthood. In the face of this immense 
privilege every educator who has no children of his 
own must, like myself, be willing to stand aside and to 
occupy a second place. No matter how large our school- 
houses or how confident our schoolmasters, it is the 
fathers and mothers of the land who are the great and 
effective teachers of childhood, and I cannot sufficiently 
deprecate their apparent eagerness to delegate this su- 
preme function to others. Perhaps when Profit is dead, 
and servants are no more, and Brotherhood is an estab- 
lished fact, a less commercial and more artistic genera- 
tion will seize this greatest of all opportunities ; and 
fathers will concern themselves with their sons and 
mothers with their daughters. I speak, then, primarily 
to parents ; theirs is the greater need, since theirs is 
the greater opportunity. 

But I also speak essentially to teachers. Under the 
present industrial and social regime, the great majority 
of fathers and mothers have neither the time nor the 
inclination to educate their children. In many cases, 
they do not even accomplish the gracious task of mak- 
ing the children mannerly and clean. The work of edu- 
cation falls upon teachers. They must not only impart 
knowledge, as in the older days, but they must also 



PREFACE ix 

concern themselves increasingly with the multitudinous 
questions of health and manners and morals, with play 
as well as work, with everything, indeed, which has to 
do with the welfare of the little people. 

Fortunately, perhaps, the teacher, in spite of his 
marked limitations, has one signal advantage over par- 
ents in general. He makes as serious blunders as they 
do, but unlike them, he has a chance to correct his blun- 
ders, since he has an endless procession of new children 
to experiment upon. A man is not dull because he 
makes mistakes, but only when he makes the same mis- 
take twice. I recall, with humility, my own first year 
of teaching. I did the thing so very badly that I was 
several times tempted to resign and to give some more 
competent man a chance. Only the sympathy and for- 
bearance of an older headmaster kept me from doing 
so. Even now, I find after many years of actual teach- 
ing work that Jt is an experience of mixed pleasure and 
discipline. In the long vacation, when my boys have all 
left me, and I sit alone before my big fireplace, brooding, 
I find myself keen to push aside the intervening months, 
to have it term-time once more, to start afresh, to do the 
thing infinitely better than I have just succeeded in 
doing it. I suppose that the parents who have many 
children have a similar chance to correct their first 
mistakes and to give the younger child a better up- 
bringing. And perhaps all parents who are faithful, 
and have tried, will have in another incarnation a chance 
to start afresh and to do it better ! 

I must warn the reader that in the following pages 
1 have not tried to be methodical or to cover the ground 
commonly expected in a formal treatise on Education. 
I have only tried to say the things that seem to me 



x PREFACE • 

important and worth while. I have tried to say them 
plainly and explicitly so that every parent and teacher 
who reads may gain the largest measure of practical 
help that I am capable of giving, and that he is capa- 
ble of receiving. I will not apologize for my extreme 
frankness. I am writing only for parents and teachers ; 
I am not writing for the young person, or even for that 
pleasant idler among books, the general reader. In deal- 
ing with anything so momentous as a human life, it 
would be criminal not to be frank. 

Although the present work is, in my own mind, at 
least, a sequel to Education and the Larger Life, it 
is nevertheless an entirely independent work, and may 
be read without hesitation by those who have not read 
the earlier book and have no intention of doing so. 
They will not be irritated by any cross-references, nor 
will they find any mention of the other book outside the 
Preface and Bibliography. Those who read both books 
will detect many similarities, but they will also detect, 
without difficulty, profound differences. If the books 
were novels, I should be tempted to say that the char- 
acters had grown older. In the earlier book I made the 
capital mistake of starting out with an abstract and some- 
what difficult chapter on the philosophy underlying edu- 
cation. It seemed to me, at the time, sufficiently elemen- 
tary, and as I have said, obvious to the point of being 
reprehensible. But the chapter proved deterrent to a 
number of readers, and was to that extent unwise. In 
the present book, I have avoided a similar mistake. I 
have been concrete and specific from the very start, and 
only in the concluding chapters have I gathered the 
threads of the argument into anything formal enough 
to be called a philosophic statement. If he so desires, 



PEEFACE xi 

the reader may of course omit these concluding chap- 
ters, — it is easier to omit the last than the first chap- 
ters of a book, — but I confess that if he does so, I 
shall be gravely disappointed, for these chapters seem 
to me to contain matters of high importance. 

This, however, is merely a detail of presentation. 
The more profound difference is in the philosophy itself. 
The earlier book was founded upon an avowed idealism, 
but an idealism of the Platonic, static sort. The central 
position of this idealism may be summed up in the one 
little sentence, — All is given. It was summed up in 
theology in its conception of Deity, — the same yester- 
day, to-day, and forever. In a word, it was a fixed uni- 
verse, and the truth was preexistent. Man's role was 
rather a dull one. He could amuse and profit himself 
by unwrapping the truth, but he could originate noth- 
ing, create nothing, alter nothing. In reality, no act 
was significant, for the august universe remained the 
same. The philosophy of the present book is also ideal- 
istic, since it places the drama of life in the domain of 
the spirit, but it is distinctly a dynamic idealism. All 
is not given ; nowhere in the empyrean does the whole 
of truth exist ; even God Himself, we believe, does not 
know what is going to happen, since all existence is 
continuous movement, eternal creation. It is not a fixed 
universe, but forever fluid, forever becoming, and even 
we, tiny earth-regents of Deity, have our own creative, 
significant work to do, and as we do it well or ill, so 
the destiny of the world becomes to that extent good 
or evil. This more fluid view of truth is too vital a 
matter to be ignored by education. On the contrary, it 
must be made the very foundation, since it places a new 
and unescapable emphasis upon human responsibility. 



Xll 



PREFACE 



One may hold a philosophy merely as an intellectual 
plaything, merely as one possible view of things out of 
many possible views, and may deliberately elect to avoid 
any translation of the philosophy into action. But this 
amounts in effect to trifling with life itself. If the phil- 
osophy is serious, it must have the force of a conviction, 
and must color all that a man thinks and does and says. 
It permeates his spirit, and so determines his whole at- 
titude towards life, that is to say, his religion. It shapes 
the direction of his bodily activities, that is to say, his 
economics. So it seems to me that education, instead 
of lighting shy of religion and economics, as our public- 
school education is taught to do, must in reality build 
itself upon these as the only sure foundation. It is an 
affair of spirit and body, and can only be fundamentally 
sound when it deals with spirit and body with thorough- 
going sincerity and intelligence. In the following pages 
I have attempted the hazardous, but to me unavoidable, 
task of making education rest upon religion and eco- 
nomics, upon spirit and body ; and I have taken the 
further ground that between these two elements in hu- 
man life there must be essential harmony. One may 
disagree with my view of religion ; one may quarrel 
with my outlook in economics ; but I do not see how 
any earnest parent or teacher can desire to build up a 
scheme of education upon any less secure foundation 
than some defensible conception of religion, and some 
defensible conception of economics. 

To the outsider, to the man not taking part in the 
game, education may easily seem a very drab-colored 
enterprise, a mixture of monotony, naughty boys, and 
ultimate disillusionment. But to the man who partici- 
pates in the game, and puts his heart into it, there is 



PREFACE xiii 

not, in all the world, a drama half so interesting, half 
so exciting, half so important as this veiled drama of 
education. As a present act, it engages all his faculties 
and resources, all his knowledge, skill, love, insight. 
He can never bring enough equipment to the task. 
And as a world-process, it is a determining factor in 
the future of the race, that part of Destiny which we 
hold in our own hands. So completely are the feelings 
of the practicing educator involved, so keenly is he 
stirred to the very depths of his being, that he may 
too easily be guilty of disproportion and overstatement. 
Because the whole of education is so large, — quite the 
largest human enterprise we have, — he may too much 
magnify the parts. I hope that this tendency dimin- 
ishes with advancing years ! In any event, I would have 
the reader believe that, in spite of my own lively enthu- 
siasm, I have striven always to keep in mind that ad- 
mirable precept of M. Anatole France, — Je vous dirai 
que Vexces est toujours un mal. 

C. H. H. 

Samarcand, N.C., 
April, 1914. 



CONTENTS 

I. Foundations . 1 

II. Religion . 12 

III. Dogma 27 

IV. Bread-and-Butter 45 

V. Body 62 

VI. The Years of Grace 87 

VII. Spirit . . 114 

VIII. Bodily Accomplishments 155 

IX. Sharpening the Tool 180 

X. The Awkward Age 212 

XI. The Life Force ....... 257 

XII. The Wanderjahr 282 

XIII. Afterwards ' 331 

XIV. Live your own Life . . . . • . . 373 
XV. The Question .421 

Bibliography 457 



WHAT IS IT TO BE 
EDUCATED? 



FOUNDATIONS 

It is my purpose to present education, not as a sci- 
ence, but almost wholly as an art. In order to accom- 
plish this purpose it will be necessary to realize that 
each step we would have our children take, we also must 
take. In a word, we must bring about in our own souls 
all those changes which we desire to bring about in the 
souls of the children. This seems to me the first and 
most important law in the art of teaching. 

A fountain does not rise above its source. As a 
practical matter we cannot communicate what we have 
not got. It is well understood that one cannot impart 
knowledge which one does not possess. It is less com- 
pletely understood that neither can one communicate 
character or goodness or spirituality unless, indeed, one 
has gained these great possessions for one's self. The art 
of educating children is not the same as the art of edu- 
cating one's self, but the two arts must go hand in hand. 
It is the only way to accomplish anything vital and 
genuine. They must travel together, the teacher and 
the taught. This is no hardship, for there are few roads 
of spiritual endeavor which will not amply repay re- 
traveling. We may have gained in part what we wish 
the children to gain, and so become persuaded of the 
beauty and desirableness of the gains, but a still larger 



2 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

harvest is always possible. The parent or teacher who 
can say to a child, " Come," rather than " Go," has 
robbed his task of all drudgery and has lifted it to the 
plane of an adventure. Like treasure-hunters, they go 
out together, and never do they come home quite 
empty-handed. It is the work of comrades and friends, 
and dismisses forever the so-called problem of discipline. 
One who would teach must first have learned, but he 
must be willing to learn all over again. It is while he 
has the child's hand in his that he can lead. It will not 
do merely to point and beckon. 

This teaching by participation, if I may so phrase 
it, has the immense advantage of giving to the whole 
process a genuine reality and sincerity. It redeems the 
teacher's part from all possible hypocrisy. It makes 
teaching a red-blooded, manly art, the source of a large 
joy and satisfaction. In the pages to follow, I mean to 
stick very closely to this fundamental principle, and 
to address myself not only to what should be done for 
the children, but quite as heartily to what we parents 
and teachers should first do for ourselves. 

Since art is to do, and science is to know, one would 
think that science must come first, that we must first 
know how before we can do the thing. But historically 
this has not been the observed sequence. Men every- 
where have first done things, and then, by reflection and 
experiment, have learned to do them better. For the 
best achievement, science and art must go together, — 
we must learn by doing. It is so in this art of teaching. 
One would earnestly desire all contributory knowledge 
for the practice of so difficult an art, but the knowledge 
is quite arid and academic until chastened and cor- 
rected by actual experience. To treat the art of teach- 



FOUNDATIONS 3 

ing in this fashion is to endow it with the charm of 
an abiding novelty. Each school-day is a challenge. In 
effect it says to the teacher : " You may know, but be 
careful. You do not know all. I — to-day — have an im- 
portant lesson to teach you." And in the home-life, every 
moment is big with a similar possibility. 

There is this verbal antithesis between science and 
art, while in the world of fact there is the most com- 
plete harmony. There is a similar double face to educa- 
tion. To teach a child is, in a measure, unavoidably to 
educate him. But we shall hardly lay hold of the proc- 
ess unless we first decide what we mean by education. 
Do we mean, by education, the imparting of informa- 
tion, a process which might be carried out by any one 
who possessed the required information, quite regard- 
less of his own character and spirit ? Or do we mean, 
by education, some inner change which we desire to set 
up in the child's soul ? Or do we, perhaps, mean both ? 
It is important to put these questions plainly to our- 
selves, and to distinguish clearly between two very dis- 
similar operations. And it is important, even though 
we finally accept both operations as essential and un- 
escapable elements in education. Like science and art, 
information and development always hunt in pairs. It 
is impossible to impart information without at the same 
time setting up changes in the child's inner life ; and 
it is equally impossible to set up these inner changes 
except through the medium of some such imparted in- 
formation. It is this perpetual interaction which makes 
education cover the whole of the waking day ; which 
makes it, in fact, coincident with the whole drama of 
life. 

Yet bound up as these two operations are, and in- 



4 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

separable as they must ever remain, the worth of any- 
given education depends upon the emphasis we place 
upon each, and the final result can only be sound when 
this emphasis is properly proportioned. If we under- 
stand by education primarily this imparting of inform- 
ation and manual skill, and stop there, we can readily 
produce a very small human product, quite devoid of 
wisdom, quite uneducated in the broad sense of the word, 
and quite limited in its capacity for human service. 
This is the defect of our so-called practical friends, and 
they are found, not only in the world of the mechanic 
arts, but also in the academic world, in those specialists 
who are prodigiously learned, but who are neither wise 
nor big nor human. But if we understand by education 
a process of impinging upon the spirit, calling out end- 
less reactions, conveying multitudinous impressions, and 
all in the rarefied atmosphere of an unchastened ideal- 
ism, we can as readily produce a very alert and well- 
disposed little person, but one who moves always in a 
world of shadows and grave unrealities. Neither of 
these products would be educated, and both would be 
unfortunate. 

In the following pages, I shall accept neither of these 
extreme positions. I shall accept my own definition of 
education, that education is the unfolding and perfect- 
ing of the human spirit. I shall accept Herbart's defini- 
tion that education is the setting-up in the soul of the 
child of a moral and aesthetic revelation of the universe. 
I shall bear always in mind that happy maxim of an 
old Spanish educator, that " To educate is not to give a 
trade for making one's living, but to temper the soul 
for life." In a word, I shall mean by education an inner 
process, a spiritual growth, a redemption of the very 



FOUNDATIONS 5 

fiber, but I shall also mean, and always, a change 
brought about through a genuine and accurate knowl- 
edge of the great outer world of men and things. Just 
as the separate facts of natural history have small value 
until they are intelligently organized into a related 
scheme of nature, so the most exact bits of information 
gathered together by the most industrious students 
have in themselves small spiritual value. They are like 
a shapeless pile of bricks, before the builder has come 
along to rear them all into a shapely structure. But 
the bricks must be sound if the building is to be sound ; 
and the design must be worthy if the completed struc- 
ture is to be admirable. 

It is in this homely way that I picture to myself the 
process of education. It is at once objective and subjec- 
tive. Its purpose is to unfold and perfect the human 
spirit by setting up in the individual soul this revela- 
tion of an orderly, moral, aesthetic universe. But it is 
not a fixed universe. It is essentially fluid, without de- 
terminate goal, made up of the combined activity of 
men and gods, and responsive to so tiny a force as 
our own individual effort. 

The educational process must then be as objective as 
the most practical of our friends would have it. It must 
gather a wealth of sense-impressions, a multitude of 
verifiable facts, an immense store of exact demonstra- 
ble information. There must be no skimping, no un- 
soundness, no inadequacy. We must be as thorough- 
going as the most thoroughgoing materialist himself. 
But this is only the beginning of education. We have 
the materials, but not as yet the structure. To stop 
here would be much as if Solomon had gathered his 
cedars of Lebanon, his gold of Ophir, his precious stones 



6 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

of the Orient, his humbler stores of brick and wood 
and rock, and then had failed to fashion them into a 
glorious Temple. It is true that we can have no sound 
education without this preliminary gathering of mate- 
rial, but the second step is quite as important, far more 
important. And here we must be as subjective as the 
most idealistic of our friends would have us. This ma- 
terial gathered in by the senses, material at once mul- 
titudinous, varied, trivial, important, homely, magnif- 
icent, anything, everything, must be organized into a 
reasonable, orderly, scheme of things in which the multi- 
tude and variety neither overwhelm nor confuse, and 
in which the human soul is indisputably the master. 
We stand face to face with variable material ; we or- 
ganize it into such a universe as we will. And this is 
education, this double process of gathering and organiz- 
ing. I need not point out how largely both the select- 
ing and the building are in our own hands. 

The lumber-yards, brick-yards, stone-cutter's sheds, 
structural-iron works, lime-kilns, and hardware shops 
of a great city have for me a curious interest and fas- 
cination. They represent such strange possibilities. 
When the builder draws upon these hardly-won sup- 
plies, what will he do with them ? Will he build a ware- 
house, a factory, a home, a temple? When the mate- 
rial is particularly sound and beautiful, I feel a secret 
hope that it may have a destiny of high repute. I 
feel a greater wonder and concern when I see fathers 
and mothers face to face with the problems of family 
life ; when I see teachers hurrying along the street to 
their several schoolrooms. They are the visible agents 
of Destiny. What designs do they carry in their hearts, 
what sort of structures are they going to turn out? It 



FOUNDATIONS 7 

is inevitable that these designs should vary, and it is 
also fortunate. It is not necessary to be uniform in 
order to be excellent. 

" My children are all so different," cries the distracted 
mother. True, Madam, but how dreadful it would be 
if they were all alike ! 

Yet there must be some underlying principles which 
will apply in education just as the fairly well established 
laws of mechanics apply in the building world. Every 
engineer and architect must observe these laws what- 
ever structure he is putting up, or else, sooner or later, 
his structure will collapse. Gravitation and the elements 
act upon all his material, but the amount and mode of 
the action are conditioned by the inner molecular forces 
inherent in each, by the indwelling spirit, if we may so 
phrase it. It would be unprofitable to attempt to reduce 
anything so complex as a human being to equally simple 
elements, to molar and molecular forces, and yet they 
do reduce in the last analysis to parallel counterparts, 
to body and spirit ; and though we might wish to edu- 
cate each child to a different destiny, we must observe 
general laws in this, that we must build the educational 
process upon the same units, body and spirit. Expressed 
in social terms, these units are economics and religion, 
— economics, which has to do with the welfare of the 
body, with food and clothing and shelter, with tools and 
apparatus and physical equipment; and religion, which 
has to do with the health of the spirit, which means, in 
short, a man's whole attitude towards life and determines 
the particular pattern in which he arranges the mani- 
fold and sometimes perplexing materials of life. 

As I conceive the matter, a sound educational process 
must rest upon sound conceptions in religion and eco- 



8 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

nomics ; and in accordance with the fundamental law of 
teaching we parents and teachers must prepare ourselves 
for our work by first clarifying our own conceptions in 
these two departments of thought, and finding out pre- 
cisely where we stand. We cannot deal helpfully with 
the spirit of our children until we have communed to 
good purpose with our own spirit; we cannot solve the 
problem of their bodily wants until we have studied 
the relation of our own bodily wants to the current 
social and industrial regime. 

This intention to found education upon religion is 
contrary to the current belief in America, except, of 
course, to the belief of our Roman Catholic friends, 
whose parochial schools now offer a considerable rivalry 
to our non-religious public schools. In combining educa- 
tion and religion, the Church seems to me wholly logi- 
cal and consistent. To a Protestant mind, to a world- 
religionist especially, the defect in these parochial 
schools lies in making truth rest upon authority rather 
than upon immediate experience, in conceiving religion 
as something fixed and static instead of fluid and dy- 
namic. It is easily thinkable that this defect will be re- 
moved when Modernism triumphs in the councils of the 
Church. In the desire to make the public schools uni- 
versally acceptable, to make them fitting training-ground 
for the children of all faiths and creeds, in the praise- 
worthy desire to offend no family or racial tradition 
in these deep matters of the spirit, it has been de- 
creed in all the States that the public schools shall 
offer no religious training. It is true that in the ma- 
jority of these schools the Bible is still read, but as it 
is contrary to law and custom for the reader to make 
any comment upon the text, the practical effect of this 



FOUNDATIONS 9 

reading is, to say the least, problematical. The lan- 
guage is too archaic for children readily to understand 
it, and, as a rule, the tone of the reading is too monot- 
onous, and the whole performance too little dramatic, 
to attract their attention. As a result, it seems to me 
that the total effect of this daily Biblical reading is 
to confirm the children in their impression that reli- 
gion may be for grown-up folks, but is plainly not for 
them. 

Judged by their fruits, the public schools of America 
have not been successful, and they have not been suc- 
cessful^ think, just because they have failed to lay 
their foundations in that most profound region of the 
human spirit, its religion. The failure of the public 
school is coming to be an article of somewhat general 
belief. But the failure has been made to consist in the 
fact that the school turns out a crowd of white-handed 
clerks and stenographers rather than an adequate num- 
ber of skilled artisans. The remedy offered is voca- 
tional education. But the defect, I believe, is much 
deeper. It is that the public school fails to turn out 
a moral product. Americans are shrewd, and in a way 
extremely practical, but they are not moral. They do 
not tell the truth, and they cannot be trusted in money 
matters. We are a highly intelligent people, but our 
intelligence lacks depth. We play about the surface of 
life, and ignore the deeper issues. As a result we have 
done astonishing things in a material way, but very 
little hrmatters of genuine importance. Even our laws 
and our courts are behind those of other civilized coun- 
tries. American life produces an impression of spirit- 
ual poverty ; outside a few favored centers, it is marked 
by ennui and half -hear tedness. It was pointed out long 



10 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

ago that the majority of persons in our penitentiaries 
have been in the public schools and are fairly intelli- 
gent. In the Federal prisons one may even find dis- 
tinguished names. If all the men who have sold real 
estate, securities, merchandise, or other salable goods 
upon false representations were remanded to prison, I 
doubt very much whether we should be able to find 
accommodation for them all. 

The desire of the public school to be universal, to 
offend none, to include all, is in itself wholly praise- 
worthy ; it explains, though it does not excuse, the 
entire divorce which it has instituted between educa- 
tion and religion. But the task set for itself by the 
public school is frankly impossible, and failure was 
inevitable. Education is an inner process ; it has to do 
with the essential things of the spirit ; it cannot be 
accomplished except through the spirit. 

It is highly desirable that the public schools should 
be non-sectarian, but it is not necessary that they 
should be non-religious. 

To make the public schools universal, to enable them 
truly to educate, it is essential that they should be 
built upon a broad religious foundation. The deepest, 
> most characteristic thing about a man is his religion. 
It is the general quality of his mind ; it is his whole 
attitude towards life. To ignore such an essential ele- 
ment in any educational scheme is to forswear educa- 
tion altogether, and to content one's self with a very 
pallid substitute. It is to gather the materials and fail 
to build the Temple. If education is this inner proc- 
ess, this change set up in the soul itself, it is mani- 
festly childish and irrational to insist that it shall be 
non-religious, that it shall leave the spirit untouched, 



FOUNDATIONS 11 

the very thing, in fact, which it set out to deepen and 
to purify. 

In the public school, we have a similar divorce be- 
tween education and economics, and for a very similar 
reason. Economics to be vital must express itself in 
political action. So long as we conceive of politics as a 
partisan affair, as an adventure in offices and spoils, it 
is desirable to keep the schools free from politics. But 
a better conception of politics is beginning to emerge. 
It is coming to be the honest, impartial effort of a 
people to better the economic condition of the whole 
people. Education cannot stand aloof. Education has 
to do with the body, with the welfare of the body, with 
food and clothes and shelter, with tools and apparatus 
and physical opportunity. But this is the subject- 
matter of economics. It is futile for education to busy it- 
self with the body, and at the same time to remain quite 
indifferent to the practical methods by which the bodily 
wants are to be satisfied. The problem is not solved by 
making education prematurely vocational. The inquiry 
must go deeper. It must scrutinize the industrial order 
as a whole, and with entire dispassion outline a more 
efficient and impartial order. An education which is 
satisfied with the present industrial disorder, and the 
present very inadequate provision for the welfare of chil- 
dren's bodies is as little practical as that non-religious 
education which professes to deal with the spirit, but 
refuses in a vital way to have anything to do with the 
spirit. 

In the following pages, education is made to rest upon 
religion and economics, because these are believed to be 
the only logical foundations. 



II 

RELIGION 

In saying that religion is a man's attitude towards life, 
it is clear that we mean something much more personal 
and intimate than any form of ecclesiasticism. Religion 
is not synonymous with either belief or action, but is 
rather that dominant note of the spirit which determines 
belief and controls action. It is the inner citadel, the 
real self, the source. If it were necessary still further 
to identify religion, we should be tempted to say that 
it is that very individual thing, personality, — it is what 
a man is. The object of education is to get at a man's 
soul, to set up changes in it, to make it larger and 
freer. It can only do this by penetrating at once to his 
real self. Anything less profound is mere surface skir- 
mishing, and is not education. In dealing with men at 
large, education must deal with that part of them which 
is most genuine and most vital, that is to say, with their 
religion. If education faces one way and religion an- 
other way, it is inevitable that man or child become 
both confused and insincere. To live well, life must be 
genuine and of a piece, must be free from the contradic- 
tion and inconsistency of harboring two attitudes. If re- 
ligion dealt with one order of truth and a given world, 
while education dealt with a totally different order of 
truth and a totally different world, then the separation 
of religion and education would be at least understand- 
able; but no one in our own day is rash enough to hold, 
or to preach, so curious a doctrine. The secret of sue- 



RELIGION 13 

cessful living is inner harmony, not the tumult of con- 
flicting affirmation and denia], hut in all movement, 
either individual or social, the single-hearted affirmation 
of the same verities. 

The history of religion is in effect the history of the 
human spirit. It is the study of the most profound 
sources. It may profitably be undertaken by the teacher 
or parent who wishes first to educate himself and then 
his children. He would better turn, not to the contro- 
versial literature on the subject, but rather to the more 
illuminating original texts. The task is not so large as 
would at first appear. Of the ancient religions, one turns 
naturally to the Hebrew, the Hindu, the Buddhist, the 
Shinto, the Confucian, the Zoroastrian, but if one limited 
one's self to the first three, one would find ample ma- 
terial for thought. 

The Old Testament will represent the Hebrew atti- 
tude of mind. It should be read in connection with the 
latest and most scholarly comment upon the text. The 
different Books have so long been read to us after the 
manner of an oracle, and separate texts presented as so 
many talismans, that it is difficult at first to bring to 
this reading a fresh and inquiring spirit. The one profit- 
able attitude is to approach these Books as literature, 
and to gather for one's self their simple and informing 
content. To gain something of a unit impression it is 
advisable to read a whole Book as nearly as possible 
at one sitting, and without the intrusion of other affairs. 
If this method is repeated with several Books, I ven- 
ture to think that the results will quite justify the moder- 
ate effort. I would also recommend the reading of such 
books as Kenan's "History of the Beni-Israel," and any 
other non-sectarian histories which are believed to be 



14 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

in the main scholarly and impartial. An attendance at 
several ceremonials in a neighboring synagogue would 
add to the reality of these impressions. They would be 
further deepened by a leisurely talk with any learned and 
broad-minded rabbi. It is well, too, to study the modern- 
ist spirit as represented in the ethical culture societies 
and in the independent Jewish congregations. The Jews 
have taken, and are now taking, such a large part in the 
secular history of the world that a study of their religion 
can hardly fail to have an independent culture value. 

The sacred books of Hinduism are somewhat veiled 
for our Western world by their too great wealth of 
Oriental imagery, but in the right poetic mood one will 
read the Bhagavad-Gita with genuine pleasure and 
profit. It has been called " the essence of the Vedas." 
Other fragments of the sacred writings have been trans- 
lated into English and are easily available. And there 
is much in modern European literature, especially in 
the work of the philosophers and of other students of 
India, that possesses large interest and value. It might 
almost be said that since the opening of Hindu litera- 
ture to the Western world, no modern philosopher has 
quite escaped its influence. This literature is all reli- 
gious. It is the unique distinction of the Eastern world 
to conceive religion and life to be one and the same 
thing. One gains, of course, a truer conception of Hin- 
duism by visiting India personally and coming into di- 
rect contact with devout Hindus. Nowhere will one find 
more complete toleration. It is the duty of the disciple 
to oppose his master, and to accept no teaching on au- 
thority. Truth, to be truth, must be the result of his 
own direct spiritual experience, and must come unforced 
and unpersuaded. It is worth remarking that in Hindu- 



RELIGION 15 

ism proper no distinct modernist movement is possible. 
In the absence of a fixed creed, current Hindu life repre- 
sents the religious aspiration of living Hindus, and is 
essentially and unavoidably modernist. 

In the same way one can better study Buddhism in 
Japan, in Ceylon, in parts of India, and in Burma, than 
in the fragmentary literature accessible to Western 
readers. But any scholarly, impartial " Life " of Buddha, 
which contains an honest account of his teachings, will 
at least serve to orientate one in the spiritual life of 
millions of our Eastern brothers. Sometime during the 
course of this study one will naturally wish to read, or 
re-read, " The Light of Asia," and one ought certainly 
to read Fielding Hall's sympathetic book, — " The Soul 
of a People." A few days ago, I received from a Hindu 
friend in India the translation of an ancient Buddhist 
prayer which I am tempted to reproduce here entire 
both because of its intrinsic, iterative beauty, and be- 
cause it discloses such toleration, such catholicity, such 
immense respect for individual integrity : — 

Daily Prayer for the World 

Let all things that breathe — without enemies, without 
obstacles, overcoming sorrow, and attaining cheerfulness — 
move forward freely, each in his own path ! 

Let all creatures everywhere, all spirits, and all who have 
taken birth — without enemies, without obstacles, overcom- 
ing sorrow, and attaining cheerfulness — move forward 
freely, each in his own path ! 

Let all women and all men, all Aryans and non-Aryans, 
all gods and all men, and they that have fallen below that 
level — without enemies, without obstacles, overcoming sor- 
row, and attaining cheerfulness — move forward freely, each 
in his own path ! 



16 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

In the East and in the West, in the North and in the 
South, let all beings that are — without enemies, without ob- 
stacles, overcoming sorrow., and attaining, cheerfulness — 
move forward freely, each in his own path ! 

Those who may care to undertake a more detailed 
study of either Buddhism or Hinduism will find in many 
of the larger cities societies devoted expressly to the 
study of these religions, and may secure through them 
translations of some of the ancient texts, as well as 
more modern commentaries. I quote the following from 
a leaflet issued by the Vedanta Society : — 

Vedanta means " Supreme Wisdom," and constitutes the 
fundamental principles of all religious ideals. It is absolutely 
free from any sectarianism or exclusiveness, being based on 
principles and not on personalities. The study of Vedanta 
enables each one to follow his own line of thought or religious 
conviction with whole-heartedness, but it gives to him a much 
broader view of love, charity, and assimilation. It declares 
that " Truth is one ; men call it by different names and wor- 
ship it under different forms according to their comprehen- 
sion " (Rig Veda) ; and it teaches that all religions are paths 
leading to the same goal. " By whatsoever path men seek Me, 
even so do I reach them," the Lord says in the Bhagavad- 
Gita. "All men are struggling along paths that ultimately 
lead to Me." 

The delicate flavor of Shintoism is so essentially 
Japanese that even in Japan the Westerner can hardly 
hope to catch more than a faint aroma. The difficulty 
is increased by the fact that Shintoism and Buddhism 
live on such intimate and friendly terms that one may 
hardly say where one begins and the other ends. In the 
majority of Japanese homes, one finds both the Shinto 
" god-shelf," and the Buddhist shrine. The Buddhism 



RELIGION 17 

of Japan has, indeed, a large admixture of Shinto sen- 
timent, just as the Christian Church still retains many 
of the ceremonials of an older paganism. In the writ- 
ings of both Lafcadio Hearn and Mr. Okakura, one 
catches something of the flavor of the old national wor- 
ship of Japan. And yet it is not fanciful to believe that 
between this delicate Oriental faith and some of our 
own Christian doctrines there is a genuine kinship. The 
nature-worship, which is so integral a part of Shinto- 
ism, is reflected in our own pantheistic moods, when in 
the face of great earth-beauty we identify God and Na- 
ture. In Japan, Nature is very beautiful. It is easy to 
believe that the worship of Beauty and the worship of 
Nature have the same aesthetic root. The second and 
most important tenet of Shintoism, the worship of an- 
cestors, has a discernible counterpart in our own Chris- 
tian doctrine of the communion of saints. 

Hearn thus sums up the ethics of Shinto : " They 
commanded reverence towards the Unseen, respect for 
authority, affection to parents, tenderness to wife and 
children, kindness to neighbors, kindness to depend- 
ants, diligence and exactitude in labor, thrift and clean- 
liness in habit. Though at first morality signified no 
more than obedience to tradition, tradition itself grad- 
ually became identified with true morality." 

If we may judge by its fruits in daily life and by its 
literature, Confucianism is a religion of austere dignity. 
The Chinese are everywhere noted for their integrity. 
In the business world it may truthfully be said of them 
that their word is as good as , their bond. The aged 
Confucian, with his firm hold upon the moral law, re- 
calls the image of the austere Roman sage. Not only 
as literature, but as a practical guide to human con- 



18 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

duct, one may still read with profit the recorded con- 
versations and precepts of Confucius. No history of the 
development of China, or even of Japan, which failed 
to consider the immense influence of this one man would 
be in any sense complete. It will be remembered that 
he was the earlier author of our own Golden Kule. 
Confucianism has now an added importance as the re- 
cently adopted state religion of the Republic of China. 
In James Freeman Clarke's " Ten Great Religions," 
one will find a brief but satisfactory account of Zoroas- 
trianism. With its central doctrine of the conflict be- 
tween good and evil, the endless struggle between 
Ormazd and Ahriman, the reader is doubtless familiar, 
and in American Puritanism he will find an exact 
counterpart. God and the great Enemy of Souls wage 
the same warfare in our older New England that Or- 
mazd and Ahriman wage in Persia, and with results 
equally dubious. Zoroastrianism has been one of the 
great religions of the world; but with this parallel of 
Puritanism in mind it is difficult to think of it other 
than as a somber figure in full retreat. 

Between these very ancient faiths, on the one hand, and 
Christianity and our more modern cults, on the other, 
it would be interesting to study the mythology of 
Greece and Rome, and the robust mythology of the 
North. They are not comparable in religious importance 
to the literature of the East. By comparison they seem 
to lack subtlety and depth. But nevertheless they have 
a value and an interest all their own ; and it is more 
than probable that a deeper study of the original sources 
will some day reveal a spiritual content now hardly sus- 
pected. Just as it took little study to reveal that the 
so-called gods of the Hindu world were not in reality 



RELIGION 19 

separate gods, but rather distinctly conceived attributes 
of one supreme Deity, so the polytheisms of Greece 
and Rome and Scandinavia may one day be resolved, in 
part at least, into a pageantry of spiritual qualities. 

I am not trying here to make out a case against 
polytheism, for such indeed is my own faith, and is, 
I take it, increasingly the faith of many reasonable, 
spiritually-minded persons. It is felt that the gap is 
too complete between man and the Most High God. 
Our sense of spiritual continuity, as well as the direct 
intimations of experience, make necessary a belief in 
an intervening company of immortals, — saints and 
heroes, angels and gods. Whether we think of these 
immortals as separate and distinct gods, or whether we 
conceive of them as divine agents, the total of whose 
power and will constitutes the supreme God, is largely 
a verbal question. It is analogous to our human ques- 
tion as to whether we think preferably of men or of 
mankind. A belief in the immanence of God is entirely 
compatible with either interpretation. It is the god- 
quality in these immortals which makes them gods, 
just as it is the beginning and growth of that quality 
in ourselves which fits us for initiation into their com- 
pany. We may believe with reason and reverence that 
the Most High God is not yet, is not realized, but is 
even now in the process of becoming; that He is eter- 
nally creating Himself and represents, not an accom- 
plished fact, but rather a supreme goal towards which 
men and gods are forever moving. It is a tempera- 
mental verdict, a matter of individual spiritual discern- 
ment, whether one thinks always of God in his corpo- 
rate, total capacity, or whether, like myself, one is 
conscious of a multitude of spiritual beings who offer 



20 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

comradeship throughout the halls of space, and the in- 
spiration of a similar possible destiny. In the Catholic 
worship of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy 
Ghost, and in the adoration of the Blessed Virgin and 
the Saints, we have a somewhat veiled but nevertheless 
indisputable form of polytheism. 

The study of these Mediterranean and Northern my- 
thologies has a distinct value from a religious stand- 
point but, quite aside from this deeper use, an educated 
person would wish a reasonable familiarity in order to un- 
derstand the constant references in art and literature. 

Whether one is a Churchman or not, the study 
of Christianity has a large importance for every in- 
habitant of Christendom. Christianity has colored and 
permeated the spiritual atmosphere in which we all 
live, and has materially and unavoidably affected 
our own attitude towards life, that is to say, our 
religion. If such a thing is possible, I would sug- 
gest that this study be made, not from the point of 
view of the Christian, or of the non-Christian, but 
quite impersonally from the outside, from the point of 
view, let us say, of a world-religionist. The first divi- 
sion of the Christian Church into the Church of the 
East (Greek) and the Church of the West (Roman), 
and the subsequent division of the Roman Church in- 
to Catholic and Protestant, are matters of historic im- 
portance, while in our own day and generation the 
astonishing growth of Modernism in both the Catholic 
and Protestant communions is perhaps the most vital 
and important movement in our contemporary spirit- 
ual life. In Paul Sabatier's " Modernism," one finds a 
faithful record of this movement as it shows itself in 
the Catholic Church, but one cannot read the record 



RELIGION 21 

without tracing in one's own mind the parallel move- 
ment in our Protestant Churches, and without wonder- 
ing whether this movement may not in the end reunite 
these two branches of the Christian Church into one 
triumphant body. Modernism, as a distinct movement, 
is only possible in those religions which have a fixed 
creed, but in these religions it is recurrent and inevi- 
table. It is the effort of the human spirit to break its 
bonds, and to establish harmony between the religious 
and the intellectual life. The attempt to found educa- 
tion upon religion is a manifestation of this same 
search for an inner unity and harmony. 

So far I have been dealing in a very general way 
with religious history, and I have been handling names 
rather than doctrines. Since America is a Christian 
country and the majority of our people are either pro- 
fessed or nominal Christians, I now propose to inquire 
what the Christian religion is. In recommending the 
study of the more ancient faiths, Hebrew, Hindu, and 
Buddhist, I suggested the greater helpfulness of going 
at once to the original sources. So in studying Chris- 
tianity, I think we shall get at its essence the more 
surely if we turn from all sectarian and controversial 
literature, and devote ourselves to the Gospels and 
Epistles. Here, if anywhere, we ought to find what 
Christianity genuinely is. Turning to St. James, I read 
that much-quoted passage: — 

Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is 
this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and 
to keep himself unspotted from the world. 

This is a very direct and comprehensible statement. 
Religion, according to St. James, may be summed up 



22 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

as service and personal integrity. It is clearly not a 
matter of belief. It is that attitude towards life which 
would make a man helpful and clean. 

But it would be even more to our purpose if we could 
in one of the Gospels come upon some report of the 
direct teaching of Christ. Of the four Gospels I confess 
to a preference for that of Matthew. It is less poetic 
than John, but it is more direct and practical; and 
Biblical scholars, I believe, consider it more authentic. 
In Matthew is to be found one of the most remarkable 
pieces of writing in the whole of the New Testament. 
It is that wonderful allegory of the Last Judgment. 
The speaker is Christ. Not only is the narrative itself 
of singular beauty and dignity, but it presents with the 
utmost clearness the standards by which Christ himself 
would judge the naked human soul. With some omis- 
sions, the narrative proceeds as follows : — 

"When the Son of Man shall come in his glory, and all the 
holy angels with him, then shall he sit upon the throne of his 
glory: 

And before him shall be gathered all nations ; and he shall 
separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his 
sheep from the goats : 

And he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats 
on the left. 

Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, 
Come ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared 
for you from the foundation of the world : 

For I was an hungered, and ye gave me meat : I was 
thirsty, and ye gave me drink : I was a stranger, and ye took 
me in : 

Naked, and ye clothed me : I was sick, and ye visited me : 
I was in prison, and ye came unto me. 

Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, Lord, when 



RELIGION 23 

saw we thee an hungered, and fed thee ? or thirsty, and gave 
thee drink? 

When saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in ? or naked, 
and clothed thee ? 

Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto 
thee? 

And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say 
unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least 
of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me. 

Then shall he say also unto them on the left hand, Depart 
from me. 

For I was an hungered, and ye gave me no meat : I was 
thirsty, and ye gave me no drink ; 

I was a stranger, and ye took me not in : naked, and ye 
clothed me not : sick, and in prison, and ye visited me not. 

Then shall they also answer him, saying, Lord, when saw 
we thee an hungered, or athirst, or a stranger, or naked, or 
sick, or in prison, and did not minister unto thee ? 

Then shall he answer them, saying, Verily, I say unto you, 
Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did 
it not to me. 

There is nothing vague or uncertain in this state- 
ment. The test is in no sense metaphysical. There is 
absolutely no question of belief, not even whether you 
believe in God. The test is simply how you behaved in 
the face of human need, — hunger, thirst, loneliness, 
nakedness, sickness, imprisonment. And its impressive- 
ness is immensely heightened by the fact that four times 
this list is repeated. It is then possible to say that Chris- 
tianity as a religion has but one essential, and that is 
Service. Religion is not a belief, but an attitude of 
mind expressing itself in human, service. 

My space does not allow even so brief an examina- 
tion into the inner heart of the other great world-religions. 
But I commend such an examination to every parent 



24 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

and teacher who desires to find secure foundations for 
his educational practice. In nearly all of them he will 
find a large admixture of ceremonial and dogma. He 
will find that in joy and gratitude men have chosen to 
build temples and to bring offerings. But he will also 
find, I think, that the essential heart of each great re- 
ligion is the same. It is service and self-purification. 

Since the foundation of Christianity but one great 
world-religion has appeared, and that is Mohammedan- 
ism. In the Koran one finds the spiritual guide of mil- 
lions of scattered followers, of perhaps one tenth of the 
human race. I have recently been reading the Koran, and 
though it has small appeal to a modernist and an Anglo- 
Saxon, I should nevertheless recommend the student to 
read it with some care. As a religion, Mohammedanism is 
less comprehensible than the other great religions of the 
East, and on account of its fanaticism and exclusive claims 
is apt to call forth less sympathy. Yet even Islam during 
recent years seems touched with the spirit of toleration. 
It has given birth in Persia to a reform movement which, 
under the name of Bahaism, is now attracting the atten- 
tion of the world. Fragments of the writings of Baha' 
u'llah have been translated into English and are now 
accessible. But perhaps one can best gain some idea of 
this new faith by conversing with its personal adherents, 
now a considerable number and scattered well over the 
United States. The present head of the movement, 
Abdul Baha, visited this country in 1912, and brought 
with him the last message that one would have expected 
from the Moslem world, a call for universal peace, and 
the brotherhood of a universal religion. In addition to 
its own intrinsic worth, Bahaism has a particular interest 
to the student of religion as the Mohammedan manifes- 



RELIGION 25 

tation of modernism ; a manifestation so catholic that it 
has spread beyond Persia and Arabia, and is even 
making a home for itself in Christendom. 

America has given birth to many forms of religion, 
but they have never shown the universality which seems 
the birthright of the religions of the East. In the u New 
Thought," in Christian Science, and in many minor 
movements destined soon to be forgotten, we see un- 
mistakable signs of the spiritual hunger of persons who 
feel the vital need of religion in everyday life. The 
curious revivals which from time to time sweep over 
the country have a similar deep significance. To older 
and more mature spirits many of these movements seem 
evanescent and even ill-advised, but they all bear wit- 
ness to the same eager search for inner harmony and 
peace. One may not with propriety feel a contempt for 
any of them. As a loyal student of religion, one is 
bound to give them respectful study. And if they an- 
tagonize and irritate and repel us, it may easily be that 
a new truth is successfully assaulting an old prejudice. 
As I shall point out later, we gain infinitely more in 
growth and enlightenment from those who disagree with 
us, and oppose us, who flout us, if need be, at every 
turn, than we do from those agreeable persons who 
share and repeat our own little stock of platitudes. 

So brief a chapter on so large a subject must unavoid- 
ably read like a satchel-guide rather than a serious 
essay, but its sole purpose is to suggest a much wider 
and deeper study than is here possible. The result of 
such a study can hardly be other, than to make one feel 
that greater than all particular religions is Religion 
itself ; and that in the spiritual life of the world, the 
agreements are more profound than the differences. 



26 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

A devout man would wish to be first of all a world- 
religionist, in genuine sympathy and communion with 
the earnest spirits of all lands, and after that, according 
to his own race or country or personal preference, 
a Christian, a Hindu, a Buddhist, a Jew, a Bahaist, a 
Shintoist, a Mohammedan. Deeper than any particular 
belief is that universal religion which is not a creed, not 
a barrier, but the inner possession of every human heart, 
the impulse to serve others and to purify the self. This 
is what we mean when we say that education, to be valid, 
must be founded upon Religion. 



Ill 

DOGMA 

The blessed Bhagavad-Gita says : " He who lias lost 
discrimination, has lost everything." 

While in any comparative study it is the mark of a 
scientific spirit first to recognize the agreements and 
then to seek out the differences, it is assuredly the 
mark of a confused spirit to sweep everything into one 
net and to declare that there are no differences. In the 
religious life of the world there are immense differences. 
To lose sight of them would be almost as unfortunate 
as to ignore the agreements. It would be a loss of dis- 
crimination and therefore a loss of everything. In a 
word, Dogma, the specific belief of the individual, of 
the Church, of the race, is a reality to be reckoned with 
in any serious attempt to make religion the basis of a 
sound education. We parents and teachers must deal 
with dogma, not only with thoroughness, but with the 
utmost sincerity ; and we must especially deal with it in 
a gracious spirit, without either condescension or con- 
tempt. There are few things apparently so futile as a 
belief which one does not share. What we need is an 
immense lucidity, to place dogma properly in the scheme 
of things, and a genuine practicality, to get out of 
dogma every possible and legitimate help. 

In the history of the spirit, the role of dogma may 
easily appear to be that of the inveterate obstructionist. 
It figures as a screen hiding the truth, rather than as a 
source of truth. In the progress of events we see spe- 



28 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

cific dogmas modified, given over, even violently repu- 
diated, until we are tempted to join hands with the ag- 
nostic, and deny the validity of all dogma, past, present, 
and future. But before we do this it is well to reflect 
that precisely the same retreats and abandonments have 
marked the history of philosophy, and, in a still more 
pronounced degree, the history of science. In philos- 
ophy and science no one denies the large utility of hy- 
pothesis and theory. It would be difficult to compute 
our indebtedness to the hypothesis of evolution, or to 
the undulatory theory of light. It is true that the ma- 
jority of these hypotheses and theories are sooner or 
later discredited. We have given them over, one after 
another, with astonishing rapidity and completeness. 
But it is also true that the majority of these guesses 
have been distinctly helpful. Under their stimulus we 
have been led to undertake those deeper investigations 
which have resulted in an altered point of view, and 
necessitated a new theory. Without some such scaffold- 
ing of hypothesis and theory, we would have made little 
progress in building up either a philosophy or a science. 
It is in this fluid way that we educators must handle 
dogma, not as something infallible and final, but as 
something purely tentative and hypothetical. It is a 
theory of the spiritual life. We must especially see to 
it that dogma always occupies this subordinate place. 
It must not be confused with religion. It must not be 
made an essential part of religion. Above all, the accept- 
ance of any particular dogma must not be made a con- 
dition of personal salvation. Dogma must ever remain 
the humble helper and servant of religion. For religion, 
let us ever remember, is not a belief, is not a creed, is 
not a cosmogony, is not a theory of the Hereafter; but 



DOGMA 29 

according to our own Christian faith, and according to 
all the other great historic faiths, it is more than this, 
— it is an attitude of mind expressing itself in service ! 
and self -purification. 

The first step in the art of teaching is, as I have said, 
to set up in our own inner life precisely those changes 
which we desire to bring about in the inner life of our chil- 
dren. To become world-religionists will be for many 
adults a very difficult process ; and it will be difficult just 
in proportion to the intensity of their separatist feelings 
and convictions, just in proportion to the tyranny of dog- 
ma. But it is the beginning of righteousness for the 
Christian quite as much as for the Hindu, the Jew, the 
Buddhist, the Shintoist, the Bahaist, the follower of the 
New Thought. One must first be a citizen of the whole 
United States before one can be the citizen of any par- 
ticular Commonwealth, or claim legal residence in any 
chosen city. In a rational scheme of things it is the 
whole that contains the parts. It seems to me, then, an 
essential qualification for every parent or teacher who 
sets out truly to educate his children that he shall lay 
firm hold of this world-religion and make it the practi- 
cal basis of all his work. The unfolding and perfecting 
of the human spirit is the bringing about of no less 
catholic an attitude of mind. 

It is so little difficult for children to become world- 
religionists that one may properly say that they are 
born such, and that they only depart from the larger 
path when they fall under sectarian influences. We 
teachers have only to preserve and broaden this child 
attitude of catholicity, and to see to it that dogma 
comes in as the servant, not as the master, of the reli- 
gious life. 



30 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

When religion is apprehended in this broad and prac- 
tical way as an attitude of the whole spirit, expressing 
itself in human service and personal betterment, we are 
in a position to treat dogma as it should be treated, in a 
thoroughly rational and common-sense manner. What- 
ever our doubt and hesitation in other matters, it is 
psychologically true that we can only believe when we 
feel ourselves entirely free to disbelieve. From the very 
nature of our mental processes, belief must be unper- 
suaded, unforced. We may accept under compulsion 
almost any given position, but we cannot under compul- 
sion come to any genuine belief. An unforgivable vio- 
lence is done to both the intellectual and the spiritual 
life when any dogma is represented to the soul as neces- 
sary to salvation. I recall very vividly my own experi- 
ence in this matter, when, at the too-early age of fifteen, 
I came up for confirmation. I had been a good boy all 
my short life, and this through no merit of my own, but 
solely because excessively delicate health had shielded 
me from temptation, and kept me in the constant com- 
pany of a good and beautiful mother. I could not have 
been otherwise than good if I had tried. But the bishop, 
whose flowing white beard and majestic brow made him 
seem to an impressionable boy as the very fountain of 
the Law, persuaded me that I was in reality an extra- 
ordinary sinner, separated by no appreciable interval 
from the vilest of men, quite incapable through my own 
efforts of attaining any semblance of goodness, and in 
the matter of the Hereafter doomed to a more than 
questionable fate. Having proved my case to be quite 
hopeless, and made me believe myself a lost soul, the 
bishop offered as the one possible rescue, the dogma of 
the Atonement. By no amount of faithfulness and de- 



DOGMA 31 

votion could I work out my own salvation, but I could 
have it as a gift, if I would pay the required price, a 
belief in the dogma itself. It only operated if I believed 
that it would operate. And so I tried, with all my boy- 
ish might, to believe in the dogma, — I felt how much 
there was at stake ! — to believe not only that it would 
operate, but that in my own fortunate case it had al- 
ready operated, and that the rescue was now an accom- 
plished fact. 

I am not recalling this curious illogic with any re- 
sentment, for I am sure that the bishop was quite sin- 
cere, and really believed that to one more sinner he 
was opening the gates of Paradise. 

But I know now that an immense violence was done 
to my spiritual and intellectual life by this elaborate 
obscuration of the essentials of the Christian life. Dogma 
was the master, not the servant. I know now that I am 
perfectly free to reject every dogma, and disbelieve every 
creed ; and that it is only in this torsionless atmosphere 
of the spirit that any genuine faith and any helpful 
belief are possible. 

I have said that one is free to disbelieve, — I mean, 
of course, that one is morally free. One is not wholly 
free intellectually in the matter of belief, since all ra- 
tional belief is founded upon experience, and that, to 
a certain extent, is given. Though we may consciously 
enlarge and direct our experience in the future, we 
must accept past experience as unquestioningly as we 
accept all the inevitable things of life. But we may mix 
with this past experience a fresher and larger point of 
view, and so change the past itself by changing its sig- 
nificance and implications. Belief, if logical and defensi- 
ble, is no more stable than experience ; but at any given 



32 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

moment our stock of beliefs must bear this inferential 
relation to our stock of experience. But most of the 
great issues of life transcend human experience, and 
we are thrown back upon other reasoning. Many of 
these issues present themselves as rather sharp alterna- 
tives, — there is a God, or there is not a God; there is 
a future life, or there is not a future life, — and our at- 
titude will be influenced by many considerations of tem- 
perament, analogy, public opinion, and the like. We 
may, with the agnostic, suspend judgment. We may, 
with the skeptic, habitually deny. But most of us are 
so constituted that we are bound to take sides. The field 
is morally free, but intellectually it is full of intima- 
tions. We strike a balance, as our commercial friends 
would say, and range ourselves accordingly. But the 
chance of ultimately finding ourselves on the right side 
will be greatly heightened, if we allow no belief to be- 
come mandatory ; at most it merely represents the high- 
est probability of the moment. 

In the religious world there are multitudinous dogmas, 

— the dogma of the Trinity, of the Immaculate Con- 
ception, of the Incarnation, of the Atonement, of Trans- 
substantiation, of the Inspiration of the Scriptures, of 
the Infallibility of the Pope, of Predestination, of the 
Life Everlasting. These dogmas have not always been, 

— they had their hour of birth. There must have been 
some moment when they first took shape in a human 
heart, in the beginning as a faint divination, then as an 
increasing probability, too soon, perhaps, as an assured 
fact. It is in this latter and least desirable form, as 
Very Truth, that the divination has hardened into 
dogma, and been handed down to posterity. It has come 
as a jailor rather than as a liberator, and with so little 



DOGMA 33 

of divine authority that by turning to Church history 
we can find out how the vote stood in favor of its ac- 
ceptance. But it is not at all necessary to hold a dogma 
in this inelastic way. It is quite possible, and much 
more helpful, to hold the dogma in its earlier form, as 
the statement of a high probability, or even merely as 
a faint divination. 

In dealing with dogma, the educator has two courses 
open to him, — he may quite frankly assume the reality 
of dogma, but declare the impropriety of his having, as 
a teacher, anything to do with it ; or, he may handle 
dogma in the fluid way just indicated, and may help 
his children to estimate it and make use of it. Public 
opinion in America has decided unhesitatingly in favor 
of the first course, at least so far as the public schools 
are concerned. That is to say, dogma is ignored. This 
does not mean that such a course is the more desirable, 
but rather that the religious life in America is still ag- 
gressively sectarian, and that such a course is pruden- 
tial. But it is open to any parent or teacher to follow 
the more rational second course and personally carry 
out this practical evaluation of dogma. If he is a man 
at all in earnest, it is difficult to see how he can avoid 
the task. 

Taking the more prominent dogmas as something 
which we are morally free to accept or reject, there 
must be some test for their validity upon which we 
could all agree, whatever our own personal predilec- 
tions. It seems to me that we are bound to apply two 
tests to every dogma before accepting it, or (which is 
quite as important) before throwing it over. The first 
test is the Rule of Reason, and the second test is the 
Pragmatic Rule, 



34 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

By the first test we get at the degree of probability 
of the given dogma. By the second test we get at what 
William James would call its cash value. 

The Pragmatic Rule must not be confounded with 
Pragmatism, the system of philosophy associated in this 
country with the name of William James. In spite of 
my affection for the man himself and my warm admi- 
ration for his teachings in general, I agree with those 
of his critics who find Pragmatism, as a philosophy, 
quite inadequate and unsatisfying. But this does not 
lessen the value of the Pragmatic Rule as a temporary 
and useful touchstone. 

We can best test the credibility of a dogma by for- 
mally stating the dogma itself as clearly and uncom- 
promisingly as possible, and then with equal care and 
lucidity stating its opposite, the alternative against 
which it must eventually be measured. It is nearly al- 
ways possible to make such statements, and by mar- 
shaling the arguments honestly and skillfully, to strike 
a satisfactory balance. The result will not be a proof ; 
but then I take the ground that dogmas are not sus- 
ceptible of proof. A proved dogma would slip over into 
the class of scientific facts and become a part of our 
positive knowledge. As such they would hardly fall 
within the limits of our present scrutiny. It would not 
be profitable to speculate when we could know. 

In some important cases, the probability is too nicely 
distributed between the dogma and its opposite for us 
to come to any satisfactory conclusion. We are then 
thrown back upon the agnostic position of not deciding. 
The very importance of the dogma at stake may, how- 
ever, make this uncertainty a distinct loss. It is just 
here that the Pragmatic Rule is of genuine service. It 



DOGMA 35 

asks, in effect, what would be the practical result of 
believing this dogma, or of rejecting it, — what differ- 
ence would it make in the moral efficiency of your daily 
life. If the dogma has no such vital significance, and 
the evidence is too conflicting to allow a rational deci- 
sion, then it is quite clear that the acceptance or rejec- 
tion of the dogma is a matter of entire indifference. If we 
cannot know, and if we would be no better off in case we 
did know, the speculation is clearly without value. But 
now suppose a dogma of such a moderate degree of prob- 
ability that we may with propriety suspend judgment, 
but which nevertheless can be shown to be immensely 
fruitful as a working hypothesis in daily life. One can 
easily call to mind a number of such dogmas. It seems 
to me much more constructive and scientific to utilize 
such a dogma to the utmost, and in our personal and 
educational plans to proceed confidently as if the dogma 
were known truth. As an article of belief, the do^ma 
has no saving grace, and one would be monstrous sorry 
to pin one's salvation to so fragile a support, but as a 
possible view of things, a working hypothesis, it enables 
a man better to fulfill the law of service and self-puri- 
fication, and so has a large practical value. Such a 
dogma is not a make-believe. It is an uncertainty and 
is held as such, but it is no less improbable than its 
opposite, and as a working hypothesis it is vastly more 
helpful. It may thus become an element in one's indi- 
vidual faith, and be entirely sincere, even though it be 
entirely tentative. I venture to think that in the per- 
sonal creed of nearly every successful man and woman 
many such dogmas will be found ; and I venture to be- 
lieve that without them these men and women would 
be distinctly poorer and less efficient. 



36 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

As we have seen, all dogma, to be wholesome, must 
be held in a tentative way, as a probability of higher or 
lower degree. But things may be true without being either 
interesting or important. And here the Pragmatic Rule 
is again helpful. A dogma of high probability, but of 
such a nature that believing it or disbelieving it could 
make no earthly difference to ourselves or any one else, 
is clearly not a dogma to engage the attention of any 
one who takes life seriously. The danger of the Prag- 
matic Rule, and the reason for the suspicion under 
which in certain quarters it manifestly rests, is to be 
found, I think, in this, that in the hands of careless or 
less truth-loving persons, the Rule may be applied with- 
out previous appeal to Reason, or even in palpable vio- 
lation of all Reason. If certain improbable things were 
true, certain other desirable results would follow, — 
therefore, let us believe them true ! This leads, of 
course, to the Fool's Paradise where one believes what 
one wants to believe, without regard to the steadying 
realities. It may be added that this state of mind is not 
uncommon, and is responsible, I think, for much fail- 
ure and inefficiency. 

It is not necessary for me to apply these tests to 
any of our current dogmas. The reader can quite 
readily do it for himself, and he can apply them with 
particular profit to those dogmas which he recognizes 
as a part of the furniture of his own religious conscious- 
ness. And he can apply them with almost equal profit 
to those dogmas which he may meet in the course of 
the day's happenings. It is quite as important to take 
on dogmas of the right sort as it is to throw over dog- 
mas of the wrong sort. A mind swept and garnished to 
the extent of emptiness is of small use. We can do 



DOGMA 37 

little through negations. The day's work requires some- 
thing positive and constructive. 

We need not hesitate to introduce these working hy- 
potheses into the spiritual life. They are only mischiev- 
ous and absurd when we swear to Heaven that they are 
Very Truth, and stake our salvation upon the high im- 
probability of their being that. In everyday life we are 
constantly making use of just such working hypotheses. 
If we want to find a man, we mentally reconstruct his day, 
and go where we think that he will, at that hour, most 
probably be found. If we want to make a purchase we 
visit the shop where we believe, after some inquiry, that 
we shall most probably find the desired article. If we 
want a piece of work done, we hunt up the artisan who 
will, we think, probably do it the best. And so we do all 
along the line. We may not hit it in a single case, or 
only in a small number of cases, but it is far better to 
have made the partial or even false divination and have 
done something than weakly to hold the hands. The 
truth is that in the conduct of our daily lives, we move 
in a world of appalling uncertainties where false guesses 
bring us all eventually to disaster and death. But only 
cowards decline on this account to go ahead. It would 
be equally unfortunate in the life of the spirit to take 
away dogma and leave paralysis. 

Treated in the flexible way here proposed, dogma has 
a large office to perform in increasing the motive power 
of daily life and in adding zest and efficiency to our serv- 
ice. What we believe colors what we do. As actors in 
the drama of life, it makes a large difference whether 
we cherish positive, constructive views, or whether we 
steep ourselves in an atmosphere of denial and doubt. 
The value of a dogma is measured by its results. Dog- 



38 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

mas which leave us cold and inactive have small or even 
negative value. This is true of the majority of theolog- 
ical dogmas, and of many of the problems of scholasticism. 
Just how many angels can balance themselves quite beau- 
tifully on the point of a needle is a matter of no pos- 
sible importance. If we knew beyond peradventure, we 
should not be one whit better off. But the dogmas which 
touch daily human life and influence daily conduct and 
kindle dormant human hearts to service and self-purifi- 
cation, such dogmas, for example, as a belief in the imma- 
nence of God, a belief in the possibility of creative ac- 
tivity, a belief in the life everlasting, have an efficiency 
quite comparable to the divinations and conjectures of 
practical life, to the assumptions of philosophy and to 
the theories and hypotheses of science. They may all be 
wrong, some of them may have to be modified, some of 
them may have to be thrown over altogether ; but mean- 
while it is vastly better to use them, and gain such vic- 
tories as we may, than to suffer the shipwreck of apathy 
and negation. 

Sober-minded men have looked askance at all dogma, 
because, when held too rigidly, it tends to sectarian in- 
tolerance and fanaticism; and when held too loosely, 
it evokes a world of fantastic make-believe. But there is 
a wholesome middle ground on which the true educator, 
whether parent or teacher, will find substantial help 
and comfort. 

Not only does it seem to me essential to the stability 
and effectiveness of our own position that we should deal 
intelligently with this whole question of dogma, but it also 
seems to me unavoidable. We are not given the choice 
of a world with dogma or without dogma. On the con- 
trary, we come into a world saturated with dogma. We 



DOGMA 39 

meet it at every turn, in every book we read, in every ser- 
mon or lecture we hear, in every play we see, in every bit 
of legislation, in every editorial or criticism, in every 
process at law, in every earnest art work ; in a word, in 
every intelligible human action. They all proceed upon 
some underlying assumption, some theory, scientific or 
philosophical, or legal, or social, or religious. Well- 
established dogmas are not discussed — they are taken 
for granted. The firmer they are, the more inarticulate 
they are. Novel dogmas, such as those now sweeping 
over the philosophical world, are expressed at great 
length, and expounded with predeterminate effort, and 
defended with visible zeal. One has to grow accus- 
tomed to them. But the current dogmas of the day 
are regarded as obvious and axiomatic. If our own tem- 
per is more critical, and we have, perhaps, lost touch 
with the instinctive dogmas of the neighborhood, we 
must ferret them out before we can understand neigh- 
borhood life, just as the district attorney must establish 
a motive for the supposed crime if his circumstantial 
evidence is to appear credible. This is particularly true 
in social matters, where Mrs. Grundy insinuates far 
more than she asserts. Think of the immense body of 
social dogma underlying the respectability of a given 
country or of a given period. 

It is into this highly sophisticated world that our 
children are born. They are not offered the choice of 
a world with dogma or without dogma any more than 
we are. They meet dogma in very concrete application 
as soon as they can understand language, as soon as they 
can themselves talk, as soon as they can at all reflect 
upon human actions. It would be a very dull small boy 
who could not tell you, by recalling the Sundays of a 



40 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

single year, what religious dogmas were uppermost in the 
minds of his parents, and how far they harmonized. 
The prohibitions and commands which dominate the 
childish world, the appeals and rebukes, the rewards 
and punishments all proclaim to the wondering, inquisi- 
tive little person some underlying philosophy of life, 
and if he combines what he reads and hears with the 
actual life of the home and school and church and street, 
it must be a singularly confusing philosophy. Since the 
most vital dogmas are precisely those which do most 
affect daily conduct, our children are brought face to 
face with dogma during the whole course of the waking 
day; and they are more profoundly influenced by this 
ever-present, insidious, unspoken dogma, more essen- 
tially educated by it than by all that they learn in 
those multitudinous schoolrooms, where the teacher has 
brought himself to believe that with the two deepest 
and most important concerns of the human spirit, — 
religion and politics, — he has properly nothing to do. 
But they cannot be ruled out. The question is whether 
we shall leave the underlying assumptions of life to 
chance, or whether we shall intelligently try to direct 
them, — in effect, whether we shall seem to educate, or 
whether we shall really educate. 

The same free spirit which would lead us to deal with 
dogma in this flexible, practical way would inspire us 
with toleration for all dogma and all holders of dogma. 
Life is far too serious an adventure, even for the merry- 
hearted, to have it rest on false assumptions. It is to no 
one so altogether important as to the holder of a given 
dogma to have it refuted if it is not truly defensible. 
So those of us who hold that in the conduct of life 
dogma is needful and important must also hold that the 



DOGMA 41 

open mind is equally needful and important. It is this 
conjoint attitude which robs dogma of its sting without 
robbing it of its power. It makes of dogma an avowed 
assumption, a high probability, a working hypothesis in 
the conduct of life, and as such quite as capable of dis- 
passionate, scientific statement as the working hypothe- 
ses of science itself. There is, then, no impropriety in 
dealing with dogma in our current education ; but, on 
the contrary, a deep moral obligation to give it all due 
consideration. 

It would manifestly be poor art to drag in dogma at 
inopportune moments, in the schoolroom or the nursery, 
just as it would be in the market-place or the drawing- 
room. But this is quite different from our present 
studied silence when the moment for speech has in real- 
ity arrived. To keep silent in regard to these vital as- 
sumptions means that we propose to go through the 
motions of life, since we must, but to see to it that the 
motive power and the underlying impulse remain hidden 
and confused. 

To handle life intelligently, the parent and the teacher 
must first clear up their own conceptions in this matter 
of dogma, and must then help the child to a similar 
lucidity, and must guard him against misconceptions 
and contradictions. The elder need not go out of his 
way to bring in such exposition, for, as we have just 
seen, the child is forever running up against dogma, and 
is forever asking questions. The particular emphasis 
put upon any given dogma will depend, of course, upon 
our judgment as to how the dogma meets the two tests of 
reasonableness and significance. Many dogmas, once his- 
torically important, have now slipped into the category of 
idle speculations. Even the bitter quarrel between Trini- 



42 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

tarians and Unitarians is now seen to have been largely 
a quarrel over words. But one cannot understand the 
literature of even the past hundred years without under- 
standing these dogmas ; and one cannot understand the 
spiritual life of the present without realizing that these 
dogmas are now essentially modified or given over alto- 
gether. Then there are other major dogmas still fight- 
ing for their life which may seem to us not only unsup- 
ported by fact, but actually harmful in their consequences ; 
and as we love the children, we will certainly wish to 
guard them against such an injury. The dogma of the 
Atonement is an example of this sort. It is still strug- 
gling for existence and is still held, nominally, at least, 
by a multitude of people, but it requires very little 
analysis to show that it is distinctly a harmful dogma 
in divorcing cause and effect, and in denying the funda- 
mental Christian doctrine of redemption through good 
works. So the dogma of Predestination, of the Verbal 
Inspiration of the Scriptures, of the Infallibility of the 
Pope, and similar promulgations must be taken into ac- 
count in any study of the past, but must be denied as 
guides to conduct in the present. It is only by such clear- 
ing of the ground that we can avoid confusion, and can 
place the proper emphasis upon those dogmas which 
have contemporaneous, constructive value. Such a list 
of helpful dogmas may not be the same for all, but it 
will be apt to include those dogmas born of actual 
spiritual experience, the more persistent intimations of 
the inner life; and to exclude the dogmas obviously 
framed by abstract and scholastic speculation. 

In reducing religion to service, and dogma to work- 
ing hypothesis, we have gained a large simplicity. But 
the big, simple things of life are the insistent ones. They 



DOGMA 43 

permit no evasion. For an unreflective mind, it is much 
easier to accept official dogma as a basis for personal 
salvation than it is to render that daily brotherly serv- 
ice which constitutes the heart of all the great world- 
religions. For that reason one meets very few Christians 
in America. In my own lengthening lifetime I have met 
a wholly inconsiderable number. As Chesterton puts it, 
"The Christian ideal has not been tried, and found 
wanting. It has been found difficult, and left untried." 
The obstacle is not, as a rule, in any failure of 
good feeling. The majority of people have a kindly 
sentiment towards their neighbors. But that is not 
enough. It is not enough to say, "Be ye fed and 
clothed and warmed." The real obstacle comes when 
the needs of the neighbor interfere with our own sup- 
posed needs. Our neighborly feeling extends to all the 
great world, except to that portion with which we have 
economic relations. But these are the very people who 
are our brothers. The religion of service breaks down 
with the majority of persons just at this critical point, — 
the one point where it could be put into practice, — the 
daily touch whereby we gain our daily bread. Much 
the same may be said of dogma. It is easier, with the 
sectarian, to accept unreflectively the dogmas of one's 
family and church tradition ; or, with the agnostic, to 
question all dogma; or, with the skeptic, to deny all 
dogma ; than it is to treat dogma as a working hypoth- 
esis which we are bound to weigh and measure, and 
to the full extent of our ability, to utilize. Many of the 
details of daily life, many of the essentials of service 
can be successfully performed without even a remote 
reference to dogma. So far, so good. But the larger 
service, the long view of leadership requires a pretty 



44 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

definite philosophy of life. One can make many a happy 
excursion, and return safely to the same port, but one 
can hardly accomplish a purposeful voyage without a 
fairly specific chart. The parent or teacher who would 
fulfill his high office must be a leader, must lead out 
of the smaller into the larger life, and to be a leader, 
he must see invisible things. He may not leave it to 
God, or Providence, or society. He himself is the self- 
appointed agent. As Machiavelli says, "God is not 
willing to do everything, and thus take away our free 
will and that share of glory which belongs to us." We 
leaders need a chart, a definite, usable, practical chart. 
Because dogma has been abused seems to me no good 
reason for throwing over dogma. • 



IV 

BREAD-AND-BUTTER 

A father cannot really educate his son, or a mother 
her daughter, or a teacher his pupil, by first assuming 
that food and clothing and shelter, tools and apparatus 
and equipment, are supplied gratuitously by Nature, 
and then afterwards correcting the mistake by showing 
that, in reality, all these things are the products of 
human labor. The opportunity to correct this mistake 
does not always come ; often it is not seized ; still more 
often, the earlier idea persists. To-clay, the majority of 
well-to-do persons take their subsistence for granted. 
If food and clothing and shelter, and all the other 
necessary equipment of an orderly life were not forth- 
coming, they would regard the failure as something 
quite monstrous and unnatural. I detect this attitude 
in the majority of college men, — I detect it in myself. 
For some inexplicable reason, we believe that the 
world owes us a living. But to have this comfortable, 
elaborate living provided for us, some one has got to 
provide it, and that is the point which we too readily 
forget. Even when it is brought to mind, however, the 
common impression of our well-to-do persons is that 
they pay for what they get, and, on the whole, pay 
pretty generously. They are much impressed, just now, 
with the high cost of living. 

But how do they pay ? — that is a fundamental ques- 
tion in education. 

Do they pay by contributing some service themselves, 



46 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

by some wholesome division of labor in which they have 
rendered a man's share? Or do they pay by means of 
a profit which they have won through some busi- 
ness operation ? Or do they pay by means of an out- 
and-out profit which has come to them without labor on 
their part, in the shape of rent or interest or dividend ? 
These are the several ways in which people get a 
living. Necessity makes a man work directly for his 
living. A certain shrewdness enables him to get a 
better living indirectly by appropriating a share of the 
value created by other people. The popular goal for 
both groups is reached when a man ceases to work al- 
together, and, through rent or interest or dividend, is 
amply provided with a living. Until recently none of 
these methods were seriously called in question, and by 
the un reflective are still taken for granted. But an in- 
creasing number of persons are beginning to ask by 
what right one group may live off the labor of another 
group. It is not a comfortable or convenient question, 
asking where our bread-and-butter comes from, but it 
is an essential question for parents and teachers. They 
are bound to inquire into the morality of the whole 
matter. They must know where they stand themselves, 
and they must be able to devise some justifiable eco- 
nomic life for their children. Just as it is easier to make 
religion consist in the acceptance of official dogma rather 
than in daily service, so it is easier to keep education 
in the air and to handle it in a purely idealistic and in- 
tellectual fashion than it is to found education upon 
solid, economic grounds. In many quarters it is still 
regarded as a degradation of education to clip its wings 
and make it face the bread-and-butter problem. But 
the world-religionist has no choice in the matter. If he 



BREAD-AND-BUTTER 47 

is to build education upon religion, — and religion 
means practical daily service, — it is clear that he can- 
not get his own living by forcing, or even by permit- 
ting, other people to work for him, nor can he allow 
his children to accept such a plan of life. He must do 
his share, and they must do their share, to the full 
measure of their strength and ability. Our educator 
does not expect education to end with bread-and-butter. 
But human life has to do with spirit and body, and ed- 
ucation cannot be at all thoroughgoing unless it con- 
cerns itself with how the needs of the body may with 
propriety be met. 

Human want is the great primal fact which every 
thoughtful educator must consider. And he must take 
it up in the order of its imperativeness : first the wants 
of the body and then the wants of the spirit. 

In our own day and generation, Tolstoy has done 
more, perhaps, than any other man to arouse the con- 
science of Europe and America to the moral necessity 
of productive work so that all may labor, but none be 
bowed down by labor. He saw very clearly that just as 
in a military nation every working man must carry a 
soldier on his back, so in our present industrial nations 
the producing class must carry on its back the non- 
producing, privileged class. He proclaimed the injus- 
tice of such a social arrangement, and in the name of 
religion called upon men to climb down off the backs of 
their f ellowmen, and take a proper share in the necessary 
toil of life. It was he who coined, or at least gave cur- 
rency to, the term " bread-labor," and by this he meant the 
labor that directly produces food. He commended bread- 
labor to every one, no matter what his station and pro- 
fession, and testified that he himself, by devoting half 



48 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

the day to bodily labor in the fields, could during the 
other half of the day accomplish more intellectual work 
and of a better quality than when he devoted his whole 
time to it. This has not, I think, been the experience 
of all who have turned from the study to the fields, but 
probably they have not tried it long enough to become 
accustomed to the new regime. It may be that bread- 
labor, like vegetarianism, must be persisted in for some 
months before its full effects can be properly gauged. 

A certain amount of bodily exercise is necessary for 
all brain-workers if they are to keep in health, and any 
deficiency in this essential is sure to lead not only to 
bodily illness, but also to unsoundness and morbidity 
in the intellectual product. If this exercise could at the 
same time produce useful social results, it is unneces- 
sary to point out the advantage. Bread-labor, as a gen- 
eral principle, seems to me an essential part of religion, 
and therefore of the Christian life. But bread-labor can 
readily be given too narrow an interpretation, and pos- 
sibly Tolstoy made that mistake. It need not be en- 
gaged in the direct production of food. It may with 
equal propriety concern itself with any other of the 
necessaries of life, either the necessaries of the body or 
of the spirit. The whole test is as to whether the labor 
is a genuine service, is the doing of something that is 
needful and important to human progress and welfare. 

The question still remains whether the worker him- 
self would not have sounder health and surer knowledge 
and a saner perception of the values and perspectives 
of life if he spent a part of his time, particularly during 
youth and early manhood, in some form of genuine 
bodily labor. Among the privileged classes, sport is 
followed as a substitute, and it has undoubtedly done 



BREAD-AND-BUTTER 49 

much to keep the younger generation sound and manly. 
But it does not take the place of genuine work. It 
means, in the first place, that our beautiful young ath- 
lete must meanwhile be supported by the labor of per- 
sons less strong than he is, — old men, perhaps, and 
tired women and little children. And, in the second 
place, the total effect of competitive sport is not good. 
The sport is carried out under such immense pressure 
that only the very fit — those who least need it — go 
in, and they ultimately to their harm ; while the large 
majority — - those who most need the exercise, in fact 
— are reduced to the poor role of spectators and ap- 
plauders. So true is this that in some of our more so- 
licitous schools games are now required of all the boys, 
and are no longer elective. 

My own experience with these beautiful young ath- 
letes is that, as human beings, they are curiously use- 
less and uninteresting. One might almost say that, in 
general, the more successful they are as athletes, the 
greater failures they are as human beings. They are 
like cats, who make up for the prodigious agility of 
the chase by prolonged periods of utter laziness. When 
not training, my young athlete is one of the laziest of 
mortals, and only under compulsion will he lift a hand 
for helpful service. He has become the victim of one 
idea. He thinks of one thing, talks about one thing, 
dreams about one thing. An honest sociologist would 
have to class him with the temporarily insane. In a 
word, the thoroughgoing athlete is socially a bore, and 
not only to older persons, but alsoto those plain-spoken 
youngsters of his own age, who by some happy accident 
have declined to substitute a tiny leather ball for the 
great round earth. 



50 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

Every human being needs bodily exercise and he re- 
joices in it just in proportion to his own soundness and 
vitality. One could ask for no better material. Many 
an active youngster would prefer to do a hard day's 
work outdoors than to go to school indoors. It is a pity 
not to apply some of this abundant, ready-made energy 
to the doing of useful home work, which, quite aside from 
its own genuine value, would inculcate the religion of 
service, and yield a new generation of socially minded 
comrades. Looking back at my own personal experi- 
ence, I see that it was a quite mistaken kindness which 
set me free from all homely duties, domestic and social, 
and allowed me to give all my time to study and self- 
improvement. The underlying theory, that my time was 
more precious than the time of other persons, sank so 
deep that sometimes I fear it will always remain. In 
my own undergraduate days, it was the current view, 
and I was probably no worse than my fellows. In the 
present day and generation, such a crippling view is 
still current, and the majority of our young people ac- 
cept it, not because they are inherently selfish, but be- 
cause they are unreflective, and naturally accept an 
arrangement so apparently to their advantage. The 
responsibility rests with us, their elders. 

But the major argument for temperate bread-labor 
on the part of all is not individual, it is social. It is 
that only in this way can the necessary productive work 
of the world get done, and still leave to all workers 
enough surplus time and energy for that intellectual 
and spiritual life which alone makes human existence 
worth while. Under the present regime, so many per- 
sons, under one pretext and another, escape all bread- 
labor that it falls with undue pressure upon the actual 



BREAD-AND-BUTTER 51 

workers, and upon multitudes of the industrially unfit, 
— children, invalids, mothers, old persons. If it could 
be shown that two hours of daily productive work, or 
even four hours, on the part of every adult and able- 
bodied citizen, were needed to feed and clothe and shel- 
ter and equip our hundred million inhabitants, then the 
moral issue would not be as to whether, forsooth, this 
amount of bodily labor would be healthful and agree- 
able for our educated, literary persons, but it would be 
the more vital and catholic problem of distributing the 
required amount of daily productive labor among those 
qualified to bear the burden. There is no possible reason 
why I should escape unless all can escape. Whitman 
states the case, when he says : " My God, I will accept 
nothing that all cannot have their counterpart of, on 
the same terms." 

It is clearly impossible that all should escape bread- 
labor, — probably, as we have seen, undesirable. Food 
and clothing and shelter and equipment must be contin- 
uously produced and continuously renewed. Given the 
earth conditions as they are, and our human intelligence 
as it is, and there is no escape. We must work or per- 
ish. The margin between subsistence and destruction- is 
very narrow and singularly contemporaneous. But if we 
find the required bread-labor either irksome or preju- 
dicial to the best life of the body and the spirit, there 
is a royal way out of the difficulty. It is, by greater in- 
genuity and closer cooperation and better management, 
to reduce the required hours of labor to such narrow 
limits as we may find to be wholesome. Intelligence 
could ask no more stirring task than reducing and finally 
eliminating the drudgery of life. The workers them- 
selves cannot do this. They have neither the leisure nor 



52 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

the intelligence nor the vision. It is true, I believe, that 
no enslaved class ever won its own liberation. It is the 
essential task of applied education. 

The increasing difficulty of getting domestic servants 
in America has already done much to further a simpler 
and more wholesome mode of living. We are using 
increased imagination in building and furnishing our 
houses. We are avoiding dust-harboring devices ; we 
are putting down tight, hygienic floors ; we are fighting 
shy of upholstery ; we are keeping our apartments bare 
and clean and easily cared for ; we are making our 
bedrooms mere wind-swept dormitories ; we are insist- 
ing upon sufficient bathrooms. On all sides we see this 
warfare against elaboration carried on in the joint name 
of increased health and diminished labor. In our kitch- 
ens a similar change is taking place. We are eating 
less, not only because dyspepsia has become a national 
malady and medical authorities are preaching a temper- 
ate diet, but also because we are no longer willing to 
pay the price of the old extravagance. In my own boy- 
hood, " three good square meals " was the established 
order of the day. Now, in our better families, there is 
but one substantial meal, the six-o'clock dinner, and two 
light, easily prepared meals, the breakfast and luncheon, 
while an increasing number of persons are either doing 
without breakfast entirely, or reducing it to coffee and 
rolls. It is noticeable, too, that a large proportion 
of the food is served in the form in which it is pur- 
chased, — fresh fruit, salad, uncooked cereals, and all 
sorts of astonishing dishes either " ready to serve " or 
needing only the slender service of the chafing-dish 
family. 

In the matter of our dress, we have perhaps not gone 



BREAD-AND-BUTTER 53 

quite so far, but we are progressing. Men's wear is 
reasonably simple, and women are looking in the same 
direction. The tailor-made gown, though not origin- 
ally an economy, has nevertheless become the father, or 
perhaps I ought to say the mother, of a numerous fam- 
ily of simple and inexpensive garments. In a word, in- 
creased intelligence and the pressure of necessity are 
doing much to reform and rationalize our household 
economy. 

There is every reason to believe that the same forces, 
applied to bread-labor, could reduce it to such moderate 
proportions that every able-bodied adult could do his 
daily or seasonal share, and be the better and stronger 
person for it, as well as the keener intellect, the more 
profound religionist, the truer artist. It is only when 
all persons work, when they all cooperate for social 
ends, that bread-labor can be reduced to wholesome 
daily exercise ; and it is only when intelligent, well- 
trained persons work that bread-labor can be made ra- 
tional and efficient. 

The old ideal of life was to work productively, if you 
must, but preferably not to work. And this is still the 
ideal of a multitude of gentle persons. But it is not 
an ideal that will bear analysis. It hardly squares with 
the religion of service. In point of fact, it is coming to 
seem to many socially-minded persons very like com- 
mon theft. Whether a man is honest or not depends, 
of course, upon the current definition of theft. Many 
honest men of twenty and thirty years ago, when judged 
by the newer definitions and standards, are dishonest 
men to-day. It is not that the men themselves have 
changed, but rather that the moral code has become 
more discriminating. It is important for all of us, but 



54 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

especially for parents and teachers, to get the matter 
straight, for one would not wish to confuse the sheep 
with the goats. We all have pretty definite ideas about 
stealing, — it is taking something that does not belong 
to you ; it is taking something for nothing. But this is 
not quite the whole story. In addition to the crude, 
old-fashioned way of laying hands on some coveted 
article and making off with it, there is a newer and 
subtler way of stealing in which the transaction has 
all the surface marks of honesty, and may even deceive 
the thief himself. It is an exchange conducted in broad 
daylight, and quite aboveboard, if one may so phrase 
it, which is yet, essentially, a veritable theft. For in 
this exchange one really gives something of value, but 
one gets vastly more, — in a word, one gets something 
for nothing, and that from the point of view of a 
world-religionist is theft, for it is the opposite of service, 
and the denial of brotherhood. 

The whole matter may be put very vividly in two 
little equations, so simple that even the non-mathemat- 
ical can understand them. Let T represent, in any 
given transaction, what you take, and D what you give. 
Then 

Theft, Old Style = T — = Booty 
Theft, New Style = T — D = Booty 

It can readily be seen that theft, new style, has all the 
advantage, since it can be carried out in broad daylight, 
and involves neither legal nor social penalties. In addi- 
tion, the booty is extraordinarily large. It may amount 
to a manufacturing plant, a forest, a railway, almost a 
principality, and may be the source of much esteem 
and personal consideration. The fact that the booty is 



BREAD-AND-BUTTER 55 

gathered not from a single householder, but from many, 
sometimes from society at large, does not alter the na- 
ture of the transaction. If this be the moral definition 
of theft, that it is the taking of something for nothing, 
then theft covers all forms of profit. Any sharp bargain, 
by which a man gets more than he gives, is morally 
theft. These operations are multitudinous. They are 
engaged in by pious persons who believe themselves 
quite above reproach, and who do not for one moment 
realize that their profit has been created by some one, 
some man or woman or child, and represents so much 
labor-power upon which no alien hand may properly be 
laid. In the last analysis, profit is appropriated labor- 
power and is the source of subsistence of nearly all 
our well-dressed, respectable persons. When questioned, 
the majority of profit-takers in America say that they 
are Christians. So were the majority of slave-owners. 
Our profit-takers are much in the same case. Like the 
old slave-owners, they appropriate the labor-power of 
other human beings. The majority of profit-takers are 
as unconscious of wrongdoing as were the slave-owners, 
— " They think no sin, where profit comes between." 
But they appropriate labor-power for the same imme- 
morial reason : it is the easiest harvest to gather and 
the largest. No amount of needful and important work, 
that is to say, no amount of bread-labor, will make a 
man rich, for the day is not long enough, and human 
strength is not great enough. To get rich a man must 
appropriate a part of some other man's labor-power, 
and he must do this many times over. He must take 
from many workers, and in return give them less than 
he takes. There are many ways of doing this, and some- 
times the profit-taker has to work very hard, — harder, 



56 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

perhaps, than any one of his single workmen ; but this 
industriousness without merit must not blind him or us 
to the real significance of what he is doing. The case 
is even clearer with those profit-takers who have long 
since given over any semblance of work, and who, 
through the device of rent or interest or dividend, 
gather to themselves the products of other men's toil. 

It is curious that while the majority of well-disposed 
persons will not only refrain from stealing goods, but 
will vigorously repudiate even the thought of such a 
misdeed, they will nevertheless steal, without scruple, 
the source of all goods, labor-power, and will quite seri- 
ously question the sanity of any one who comes along 
and tells them that this, too, is theft. For it is just as 
reprehensible to steal labor-power as it is to steal the 
multiform products of labor-power. Yet this is just 
what men do when they gather profit. To render them 
profit, some one has worked the harder, some old man, 
perhaps, or tired woman or delicate child, and, all un- 
requited, has rendered up this something for nothing 
which business calls profit, and morality calls theft. 
The profit on land is rent ; the profit on money is in- 
terest ; the direct profit on labor-power is dividend ; 
but they all reduce to the same thing, — they are all 
appropriated labor-power. 

The great wrong of our present industrial system 
results from ignorance, not from intention, and can 
only be righted by study and enlightenment. In at- 
tempting the work of education, we must, as I have 
said, begin with ourselves. It is easy to take something 
for nothing. A teacher can do this through over-pay, 
or under-work, or unnecessary and meaningless serv- 
ice. He can do it through many devices and disguises. 



BREAD-AND-BUTTER 57 

He must ask himself the same penetrating question 
which he would put to the rest of the world, — Is 
his own labor quite needful and important, or is he, 
perhaps, merely marking time in the service of some 
outworn convention? Is he teaching things that are 
worth while, and is he doing it efficiently ? And every 
parent must ask himself the same question in regard 
to his own vocation, — Is it needful and important, a 
genuine social service, or is it merely some trivial de- 
vice by which, from the great productivity of the day, 
he snatches his unearned, greedy handful ? These per- 
sonal questions are not comfortable, not always gra- 
cious, but they are essential for all parents and teachers 
who aspire to educate. 

One will not talk economics in any formal way to 
children. It is not necessary. But one cannot avoid the 
economic implications upon which our current daily life 
and all history and literature quite obviously rest. It is 
not a world with economics or without economics, any 
more than it is a world with dogma or without dogma. 
No such choice is open to us. The child comes into a 
world saturated with economic implications quite as tho- 
roughly as with religious dogma. Our current morality 
depends in large measure upon our economics, upon the 
way in which we gain our daily bread-and-butter. The 
great historic world-movements have taken place under 
the pressure of economic want. They have been migra- 
tions from the region of scant supply to the reputed land 
of plenty. The pregnant source of quarrels and wars 
has been the division of earth's harvests. Privilege, the 
unearned right to the harvest, is always being called in 
question by the actual gatherers of the harvest. 

The economic question is not one that can be avoided, 



58 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

or one that it is desirable to avoid. Children are very 
explicit in their interest. They want to know what the 
hero feeds upon, how he is dressed, where he sleeps. 
If great deeds are in prospect, wars to be waged, 
palaces to be built, pleasure parks to be laid out, 
princesses to be won, tourneys to be run off, the little 
reader has a keen eye for the sinews of war. In every 
tale worth the telling, the hero sets out with the ex- 
press purpose of seeking his fortune. Parents and 
teachers do not have to drag in economics by the heels. 
They may, of course, ignore the question, and allow 
the children to grow up with confused and mediaeval 
ideas ; but if they do so, they fail quite miserably to 
educate the children in the fundamentals of a moral 
individual and social life. The bread-and-butter ques- 
tion must be met by each parent and teacher in his 
own personal life ; and in dealing with the children, it 
must be met constantly and in the most unexpected 
quarters. 

Daily bread must be gained by daily labor, and my 
own personal conviction tends increasingly to the be- 
lief that all able-bodied men and women must do their 
share if their own personal lives are to be sane and 
wholesome, and if civilization for the whole is to be 
possible. Bread-labor is better than gymnastics or 
sport. It has always the dignity of a defensible pur- 
pose, and it may be made joyous as well as productive. 
For the degrading drudgery of modern life there is 
no excuse. It offends both taste and conscience. The 
necessary work — the work that is needful and impor- 
tant — is never degrading, and it need never be drudg- 
ery if it is performed by comrades working together 
in harmony and good-fellowship. When men cease to 



BREAD-AND-BUTTER 59 

appropriate the labor-power of others, song will re- 
turn. We must have the " Singing Man," who will 
chant the praise of work as well as of play. The por- 
tion of labor must not be over-work and uncler-play, 
mean living and stunted intellect. The portion of labor 
must be the just equivalent of labor and a man's chance 
for an ideal life. 

At present our well-to-do children are brought up with 
the idea that they are to seek some business or profes- 
sion which will carry them as far as possible from the 
necessity of bread-labor, and return the largest income 
for the least toil. Our middle-class children are imbued 
with the idea that the end of all education is to get 
them settled in life financially. Our poor children grow 
up to the worship of a job. It need not be dignified and 
worthy and wholesome, just so it pays regular and fairly 
good wages. The present panacea for industrial evils is 
vocational education, and when introduced at the proper 
time, nothing could be better. No serious scheme of 
education is complete unless in the end it is vocational. 
But it must be a means, not an end ; and it must start 
out with a searching and intelligent criticism of all vo- 
cations, emphasizing those which are needful and im- 
portant, and discarding those which are harmful and 
parasitic. The parent or teacher cannot deal with this 
important question of vocational education in any help- 
ful way unless he approach it from the human end, 
and measure it by social as well as industrial standards. 

The time to instill wholesome social ideas on the 
bread-and-butter question is during the whole of child- 
hood and youth. But, as we have been insisting all along, 
the parents and teachers must first have these wholesome 
social ideas themselves before they can instill them into 



60 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

the children. They must study the land question, the 
most fundamental of all, and the money question, and 
they must weigh the propriety of all profit. They will 
do well to begin with some orthodox textbook, and 
afterwards turn to more radical writers, such as Tolstoy, 
Ruskin, Henry George, H. G. Wells, and the Fabian 
Society tractarians. Many of the issues are far from 
settled, and the study of economics is distinctly puzzling, 
but the children meanwhile are here and must be edu- 
cated, and we who pretend to educate them must do 
our best to clarify our own ideas on these basal points. 
The welfare of the body is one of our major concerns, 
and that welfare, as we teachers too little realize, de- 
pends not alone upon gymnastics and hygiene and man- 
ual training and bodily culture generally, but also just 
as vitally upon the prevalent industrial conditions in the 
community, upon our views about rent and interest and 
dividend. The bodily, and therefore the spiritual wel- 
fare of millions of children will be vitally affected by the 
position we take in regard to this whole question of 
profit. As practical persons we must not expect too im- 
mediate changes in the industrial world. Vested inter- 
ests change slowly. But what we do desire is that the 
national vision shall be marked by increased clarity in 
such matters, and that the rising generation, our own 
successors and supplanters, shall achieve an industrial 
life much in advance of our own. This can only be ac- 
complished if we moulders of public opinion, we parents, 
teachers, priests, editors, writers, statesmen, publicists, 
get these matters straight in our own minds, and then 
teach the children, from the nursery up, the essentials 
of a rational industry. It is human nature to want the 
lion's share, but it is contrary to the fact to say that 



BREAD-AND-BUTTER 61 

you cannot change human nature, for it is changing all 
around us, all the time, and never so fundamentally as 
at the present moment. The thing that does not change 
is the desire for personal individual welfare. This is 
highly fortunate, for such a desire is the cause of all 
progress. What we want to change is the ideal of wel- 
fare, to make it include all, and to make it consist in 
personal quality and distinction. Such an attempt is just 
now particularly timely. On all sides there are hard- 
headed, practical persons who are beginning to question 
this doctrine of the lion's share. It is felt increasingly 
that an average share in a more orderly world would 
yield far more happiness than the lion's share in a world 
of muddle. 

Assuming our own economic house to have been put 
in order, we can helpfully instruct the children, at 
every turn, in their lessons in history, in arithmetic, in 
geography, in reading; in fact, in all the activities of 
the day. We need not formulate our economic creed or 
give it any verbal expression. We have only to make 
it the underlying implication in the way we handle the 
events of the day. Perhaps the most important lesson 
we can communicate is the lesson that no one is truly 
educated who has not come to sound views, and also to 
sound practice in the matter of his bread-and-butter. 



V 

BODY 

If we followed the approved method of our so-called 
practical friends, we would perhaps avoid all theory. 
But in doing so we should cease to be practical. We 
live in a world saturated with theoretical implications of 
all kinds. We have seen this in the matter of religion and 
economics. It was not a choice of a world with dogma 
or without dogma; with economic implications or with- 
out them. It was a choice of dogmas and of implica- 
tions. It is quite the same when we come to deal with 
the human body and its part in education. One might 
willingly avoid so debated a topic as the relation be- 
tween soul and body, but daily life proceeds for each 
one of us upon some avowed or unformulated assump- 
tion. Our current phrase " to keep soul and body to- 
gether " indicates that we have here a partnership 
whose dissolution would mean death. In my own child- 
hood an old conundrum was current ; one that pleased 
us greatly because of the play on words, and because 
of what we supposed to be its obviousness. The conun- 
drum was this : " What is mind?" and the answer, 
"No matter !"" What is matter?" and the answer, 
" Never mind ! " This was typical of the prevailing at- 
titude, not alone of the latter part of the nineteenth 
century, but of many previous centuries. It was the 
common assumption that soul and body are independent 
entities, which for some inscrutable purpose are chained 
together during life, and separated at death. It was al- 



BODY 63 

so a part of current thought, especially of ecclesiastical 
thought, that this partnership was far from harmonious 
or helpful. Flesh warred against spirit. To subdue the 
flesh, to mortify the body, — this was the common am- 
bition of the spiritually minded. 

The lives of the saints present a distressing picture 
of personal uncleanliness, unsanitary practices, macera- 
tion, flagellations, self-inflicted torture, courted disease, 
and coveted suffering. As so exhibited, Christianity is 
a distinct form of pessimism. The present world is es- 
sentially evil. The beatitudes are all of another and a 
better world. The body is manifestly of the present 
world, an earthly garment, to be left gladly behind 
when death opens the door to better and more abiding 
things. To deny the body and inhibit its natural desires 
and appetites becomes, then, a consistent article of faith 
and works. In many religious orders in various parts of the 
world this spirit still persists as a part of their confessed 
creeds. It persists in less articulate form in many indi- 
vidual lives, — pain is better than pleasure, celibacy 
than parenthood, hunger than satisfaction, illness than 
health, emaciation than prowess, death than life. It is 
seldom stated in quite so bald a fashion as this, but in 
a more veiled form it crops out in unexpected quarters, 
and in fact lies latent in much of our older education. 
In moments of profound discouragement, the human 
spirit easily runs to cover under some of the many forms 
of martyrdom. There are few communities or families 
which do not harbor some poor soul who loves to be 
miserable. One might almost say that potentially 
speaking we are all of us possible martyrs, and dis- 
posed when victory costs too dear to make an inverted 
victory out of defeat. 



64 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

This doctrine of the conflict of body and spirit has been 
curiously triumphant. But everywhere it has always 
been called in question by the healthy-minded, — not 
alone by the pleasure-lovers of history, but as well by 
philosophers of a more robust type. The revolt against as- 
ceticism, and its underlying dogma of the essential antag- 
onism between the bodily and the spiritual life, reaches 
its extreme expression in that scientific materialism which 
was an early and unreflective product of middle nine- 
teenth-century thought. The pendulum was made to 
swing completely over to the other side. Body and soul 
were no longer antagonistic, — they were not even sep- 
arate. Body was everything, the experienced reality; 
soul was a pretty name for body's more poetic reactions. 
The spirit of this time was well expressed by that fa- 
mous formula of materialism, — "the brain secretes 
thought, as the liver secretes bile." So extreme a posi- 
tion was pretty sure to lead to a speedy reaction. In 
our own day, the pendulum has once more swung back 
again, and threatens to go as far in the opposite direc- 
tion of spiritism. In my own lifetime of thought there 
has been an almost complete reversal of position. Ma- 
terialism explains nothing ; we turn again to the mys- 
tery of the spirit. 

As a matter of experience, we everywhere observe a 
close parallelism between body and spirit. There are 
intimations of a puzzling and baffling, but nevertheless 
convincing, sort which seem to indicate that spirit is 
the motive-power in human life; and body, the beau- 
tiful and complicated tool. It is a region where positive 
knowledge grows very slowly, and no dogma can claim 
more than probability. In the work of education, we 
are bound, I think, to accept a belief in this very close 



BODY 65 

parallelism between body and spirit and to strike for the 
health of both. Beyond this parallelism, one's individual 
belief is probably a matter of temperament. The spirit 
of our Western world expresses itself in the formula 
that the body has a soul, — the spirit of the East puts 
it that the soul has a body. It is a difference of emphasis. 

For myself, I prefer the Eastern statement, since it 
represents for me the higher degree of probability. I 
shall assume, then, that soul is the motive-power, the 
inspirer, and that body is the tool, the carryer-out. I 
assume this, not as a demonstrable, experimental fact, 
but because, of the two alternatives, it better squares 
with the experiences of daily life. In every department 
of human effort it is the spirit which counts. I assume 
it also on pragmatic grounds, since the directive action 
of spirit offers the more helpful outlook. In making this 
frank assumption, one need not lose sight of the innu- 
merable interactions between bod} r and spirit, nor forget 
that in ministering to body one helps spirit. 

These profound matters are not decided by any mere 
count of hands, but it is worth remarking that current 
philosophical thought, after both the scientific invasion 
and the inevitable reaction have been allowed for, reas- 
serts the supremacy of spirit and the unescapable reality 
of the inner life, of intuition and direct, durable expe- 
rience. This in no way discredits scientific truth. It 
merely points out its' limitations, points out that it is 
static, relative, utilitarian, while the inner light which 
after all men have to live by, is dynamic, absolute, disin- 
terested. It is within bounds to say that our twentieth 
century opens with a spiritual renaissance which no 
thinker can easily ignore. 

From either point of view, however, education has to 



66 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

do essentially with body. From a materialistic point of 
view, the body is the source and fountain of all the sub- 
sequent intellectual and social life. From the point of 
view here adopted, the body is the wonderful and beau- 
tiful tool by means of which the spirit carries out its 
human purposes. 

When it comes to the practical, everyday work of 
education, the danger in the materialistic theory is that 
health and physical prowess too readily come to figure 
as ends in themselves, and as such to run to muscle and 
appetite ; with the avowed end, the human spirit, a 
somewhat secondary and ineffectual blossoming. The 
bodily integrity which true education seeks is not mus- 
cle and bulk, but that fine organization of bodily tissue 
which fits it for the nice services of the spirit. It is not 
practicable to develop body along the lines of a mere 
healthy animalism, and then later to add the gift of the 
spirit. It is true that this sometimes happens, — there 
are cases of genuine "conversion," — but more fre- 
quently it fails to happen. Nor is it practicable to culti- 
vate the spirit exclusively, trusting to some future effort 
to develop an adequate tool for the carrying-out of the 
purposes of the spirit. The two processes must go on 
pari passu. The close parallelism between body and 
spirit which we accept in theory, we must observe in 
practice. 

Regarding the body as a tool which is to be fashioned 
with the utmost care and efficiency to this nice service 
of the spirit, education must deal quite frankly with 
naked bodies. I speak now of efficient education, not of 
that poor, makeshift sort which would build in the air, 
ignoring the very foundations, and stands abashed and 
confused in the presence of the uncovered body. No 



BODY 67 

other workman in all the range of our industries at- 
tempts to fashion his tool by first covering up his mate- 
rial, and then cultivating a delicate ignorance about its 
essential qualities. But parents and teachers too often 
do this very stupid and ineffectual thing in dealing with 
the bodies of their children. They seem to forget that 
the human body is an organism which shares with every 
plant and animal on earth the fivefold cycle of organic 
existence, — birth, nutrition, growth, reproduction, and 
death. These are the great facts in the bodily life, and 
they are consequently essential elements in the problem 
of education. We parents and teachers are hopelessly 
stupid and unfaithful if we allow either ignorance or a 
false delicacy to obscure these essential elements, and 
turn our attention to what is superficial and unimpor- 
tant. If we are to produce a generation of strong and 
able men, we must face this immutable cycle of organic 
life, the mysterious problem of birth, the practical, life- 
long problem of nutrition, the statistical problem of 
growth, the race problem of reproduction, the august 
problem of death. 

If education is to gain this organic efficiency, it must 
deal quite frankly and willingly with naked bodies. We 
do this now in the nursery. Careful fathers and mothers 
watch the bodies of their little children, and rejoice 
in their purity and beauty. The food is studied and 
scrutinized. If there seems anything amiss the doctor 
is consulted and questioned. From month to month, 
the clean little naked bodies are carefully weighed, and 
the results compared with the tables of normal growth. 
In thousands of homes the land over, this joint worship 
of childhood and beauty is daily offered. No one can 
witness, untouched, the ecstasy of a couple of young 



68 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

parents over the marvel of a first baby. It may amount 
to foolishness, but it is a fortunate foolishness. Young 
people who were perhaps selfish and inconsiderate, idle 
and pleasure-loving, now hurry away from old pastimes 
to this new service in a small white temple, where the 
ceremonial furniture is crib and bathtub, and the pre- 
siding deity is a tiny child. 1 am watching now, with 
confessed reverence, a young mother who is still nurs- 
ing her six-months-old man-child, and who means to 
nurse him three months more, in order to give to the 
world the stronger and finer man. 

As the children grow older, they do not need the 
same minute care, but they do need the same sort of 
intimate care. As a rule, they do not get it. The nov- 
elty perhaps wears off, the old call to work or play re- 
asserts itself, other babies arrive and absorb attention. 
The older children get crowded out. But their needs, 
if less immediately imperative, are every whit as impor- 
tant. Parents should still concern themselves with the 
naked bodies of their children to see that they are prop- 
erly nourished, to see that muscles and nerves are 
sound and adequate, to see that eye and ear and hand 
and voice are properly trained, to see that growth is 
quite what it should be. Not only is it necessary that 
the body should be subject to this careful scrutiny from 
week to week, but the body itself needs the tonic of di- 
rect contact with air and sunshine. All growing bodies 
need this contact, and children quite as much as plants 
and animals. In summer — and in large areas of the 
United States, this means full half the year — the 
small boys in all clean neighborhoods would be the bet- 
ter if they could dispense with all or nearly all cloth- 
ing. Even for the older boys a pair of neat bathing- 



BODY 69 

trunks or running-trousers is all that is needed. In 
my own summer camp in New Hampshire we observe 
this simplicity. In a few days, the bare chests and legs 
and arms attract no attention. They become clothed 
with a healthy coat of tan. The costume is felt to be 
so natural and proper that in spite of its novelty, it 
is carried with a fine unconsciousness. Along with this 
exposure of the body to the air and sunshine go the 
other elements of the simple life, — a plain diet, cold 
shower baths in the open, abundant exercise, long hours 
of sleep in the clean air, high thinking, and good- 
fellowship. As a practical matter, each simplicity seems 
to make the others increasingly possible. The tonic effect 
of such a life is truly remarkable. Little chaps who 
have always been classed as delicate become visibly 
robust. 

I count the added manliness of spirit and cleaner 
morals of equal value with the increased health. As 
efficient educators we must accept the body, — it is 
too insistent and too important a fact to be ignored. 
We take the first step towards a sound manliness when 
we teach boys not to be ashamed of the naked body, — 
when we teach them to be ashamed of feebleness, of 
under-development, of sickness, of all uncleanness, but 
to rejoice in the strength and beauty of a clean, well- 
developed body. Children are not naturally ashamed of 
their bodies, for they have nothing to be ashamed of. 
It is we elders who burden them with a sense of shame. 

We parents and teachers fail to educate our boys 
unless we succeed in keeping them chaste, — chaste 
through knowledge, not through ignorance. The lack 
of chastity among boys is a common evil which every 
educator must face and fight. It is commonly thought 



70 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

to be a graver problem in boarding-schools than in the 
home. That it is a grave problem head-masters in both 
Europe and America have quite frankly confessed to 
me; and I have had to meet the same problem even in 
a summer camp. It is impossible to know how such 
matters stand relatively, but my own experience with 
boys leads me to believe that self-abuse is more gener- 
ally practiced among solitary boys living at home than 
it is among boys living in groups. In such cases as 
have come under my own observation, the habit grew 
up in solitude and secrecy, and came to light in group 
life. It was stamped out partly by public opinion, but 
still more by the personal efforts of a manly, enlight- 
ened master. It is distinctly not a matter which a con- 
scientious father may safely or properly take for 
granted. I formerly felt that the question of sex was 
too delicate for a schoolmaster to mention to growing 
boys, and that it fell wholly within the province of 
fathers. I still feel that the father is the proper one to 
explain sex to a boy, just as the mother is the proper 
one to explain it to a girl. But as a rule, fathers fail 
to perform this plain duty, and confess quite openly 
that they feel a hesitation and delicacy about discussing 
these matters with their boys. Such a position seems to 
me wholly indefensible, a grave neglect of a plain duty. 
It falls, then, upon the teacher, and he must perform 
the duty with delicacy, with intelligence, and with 
thoroughness. I do not believe, of course, that a knowl- 
edge of sex or the wholesome habit of nakedness will 
cure all boyish un chastity. But I do believe, from ex- 
perience, that they diminish it, that the unashamed con- 
templation of the naked body and a full and frank 
knowledge of its qualities and potencies not only lead 



BODY 71 

to a more robust health, but also to a more profound 
morality. 

The complete health of the body should be the first 
specific aim of education. It is the most important prob- 
lem now before American parents and teachers. There 
is a diminished mortality among infants, and there is 
a marked control in many of the old contagious and 
endemic diseases, but there is an alarming increase in 
the number of chronic ailments, in the number of in- 
sane persons, and in that company of feeble, inert per- 
sons, for whom at too early an age life has ceased to 
be a joy and has become a burden. Judged by the 
common defects in eye and ear and voice and teeth, by 
our diminished stature and weight, by our lessened en- 
durance and physical prowess, by the diminishing birth- 
rate in all civilized countries, we stand as a race face to 
face with degeneration. This loss of bodily vigor seems 
to be the direct result of the change in our national 
habits, Our industrial life turns from the open to the 
factory. Our families migrate from the country to the 
town. On all sides we see an increase of conveniences, 
an increase even of the average lifetime, but along 
with these gains a distinct loss in health. The truth 
is that this very command of utilities has made us 
grow soft, — we pamper ourselves too much, we pro- 
tect ourselves too much ; we over-eat, and over-clothe, 
and over-heat, and over-indulge. The unavoidable re- 
sult is degeneration, and a visible enfeeblement. The 
evidence is most noticeable in the older nations of civ- 
ilization and particularly in those nations where the 
factory system has been most completely developed ; 
but it is also to be found in newer nations like our- 
selves. We have still, fortunately, an immense amount 



72 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

of health and bodily vigor. It is the national resource 
that we ought most jealously to conserve. Bat genuine 
health is not the common heritage in either country or 
town. On all sides one sees the signs of a lack of 
health and strength. There are those who profess to 
believe that five-foot men are as good a national prod- 
uct as the old six-foot men. Possibly they are, if we 
value men simply as labor-power; the smaller man 
might even be a better factory operative. But humanly 
speaking, the dwarfing of the race now being brought 
about by facto r}^ and urban life is much to be deplored. 
The required height for recruits in the British army 
has been reduced within little over a half-century from 
five feet six inches to five feet. It is credibly reported 
that the city of Manchester in England can no longer 
recruit her police force among her own citizens, but 
must send into the country districts to find men of suf- 
ficient height and brawn. Happily the modern world 
needs many things far more than it needs soldiers and 
policemen ; but these facts are significant. Even more 
disabling than mere decrease of stature is the lack of 
health and endurance which seems on all sides to be 
increasing. One meets few persons of even moderately 
good health ; fewer still who are robust. Nearly every 
one is suffering from some more or less disabling 
malady or some inconvenient defect of faculty. Valu- 
able hours are taken out of a lifetime, valuable lives 
end all too soon. More serious still, the quality of life 
suffers. Our feeble folk go through the motions of 
daily life, but they get neither the satisfactions nor the 
results. We all know that a sick man is more or less 
of a rascal, and have known it long before Dr. Johnson 
said so. 



BODY 73 

It may be a habit of advancing years to believe in 
the greater robustness of one's own generation. I recall 
that to my father my own youth seemed somewhat 
colorless and pampered ; while I, in turn, look upon my 
younger friends as noticeably deficient in the physical 
endurance which made possible my own adventurous 
life of travel and investigation. It is not so much that 
they are unable to stand the strain which an older 
generation accepted as a matter of course as it is that 
they are unwilling. But this unwillingness to meet the 
demands of a more robust life leads in the end to a 
genuine inability. It is no idle alarm, this call for a 
more robust manliness. It is a national need which 
parents and teachers must take into account in all their 
educational schemes. 

In driving through the Yosemite some years ago, I 
had the good fortune to gain that coveted thing, a seat 
next the driver. We came, en route, to an Indian mend- 
ing the roadway. I asked to what tribe he belonged, and 
was told (quite appropriately, I thought) that he was 
a Digger Indian. When I further asked something of 
the quality of the tribe, the driver said that in general 
they were not much esteemed, but that, for his own part, 
he thought very well of them, and he then told me the 
following incident. His brother was a horse-dealer, and 
employed a Digger Indian to look after his stable. On 
one occasion, several animals were to be delivered at a 
given point some distance away. It so chanced that 
the dealer, away on another errand, was detained for 
several days. The Indian, therefore, quietly delivered 
the horses and returned to the stable, a total journey 
of three days. When the dealer came back, he was 
much pleased, but he was also puzzled to know how 



74 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

the Indian had accomplished the journey without any 
money. When questioned, the Indian explained that 
he had fed the animals at well-known stopping-places, 
told to whom they belonged, and had the bill charged. 
The dealer asked what he had done for his own food. 
The Indian had not eaten anything for the entire three 
days, but it seemed to him too small a thing to men- 
tion ! I am recalling this incident because I know so 
many persons who are not only upset by the loss of a 
single meal, but even grow visibly ill-tempered if the 
meal provided fails to come up to their expectations. It 
is odd that the well-known injunction, Feed the brute! 
should apply to educated persons, rather than to our 
less civilized brother. 

In the last analysis disease is filth and health is clean- 
ness. The way to fight disease is to fight dirt. The way 
to establish health is to gain the utmost attainable clean- 
ness, — in the air we breathe, in the water we drink, in 
the food we eat, in the clothes we wear, in the apart- 
ments we inhabit, in the apparatus we handle, in the 
streets and grounds we frequent. This thoroughgoing 
cleanness is a matter of education. To make the body 
and the thought clean, inside and out, is to endow a 
child with health. Those who have gained health may, 
through simple living and proper exercise, add strength. 
Endurance is a spiritual quality, and needs, in addition 
to an adequate body, the efficient cultivation of the will. 
I have never been in the army, but I can readily believe 
that the officers excel their men in simple physical en- 
durance. I know that in rough surveys in which I have 
taken part the leaders, the so-called "instrument men," 
could always outstrip their seemingly stronger helpers, 
the linemen and choppers. The leaders cared — the will 



BODY 75 

was enlisted. Endurance is a matter of the spirit, even 
more than of the flesh. 

Parents are the natural guardians of the health of 
the children. It is a grave business to know how health 
may be established, and then to establish it. If need be, 
the skilled doctor and the trained nurse and the sani- 
tary engineer must be consulted and followed. When 
these are not available, the best literature of hygiene 
will render some aid. Teachers who are masters in resi- 
dence schools stand in loco parentis to the boys under 
their care, and must be equally efficient and insistent 
in all these health matters. Even the teacher in a day 
school must make the health of the children his first 
care. The schoolroom must first be made as hygienic as 
possible, and then, knowing himself what ought to be 
done, the teacher can share his knowledge with the 
parents, through bulletins sent to each home, through 
personal visits to the parents, and through conferences 
held at the schoolhouse. The human body is very sacred, 
— it is the tool of the spirit. But before you can sharpen 
and fashion the tool for its high office, you must have 
sound material to start with, a good wholesome bodily 
tissue. If health has the immense and fundamental im- 
portance in education which I believe that it has, it is 
worth working for, persistently and intelligently. It is not 
difficult to publish practical instructions for the attain- 
ment of health, but it does require great faithfulness to 
carry them out. 

The schoolhouse, like the home, should be first of all 
a true sanitorium. 

I do not know of any more practical way of present- 
ing this quest of good health than by making health 
synonymous with cleanness. If everything that concerns 



76 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

a child's life is made rigorously clean, the child will 
have health. 

The first thing to begin with is obviously the air he 
breathes. Some of the most prevalent and fatal diseases 
are those of the respiratory system, and they are the 
direct result of foul air. The only practical way to have 
a child breathe clean air is to have him sleep, eat, play, 
and receive instruction outdoors, — this is now done 
with tubercular children, — or else, if that is impossible, 
to have the atmosphere of such rooms as he does inhabit 
so constantly renewed that there is no chance of its be- 
coming vitiated. But the art of indoor ventilation is one 
of immense difficulty. When it is remembered that one 
pair of lungs will vitiate nearly one cubic foot of air 
per minute, the problem of adequate ventilation seems 
well-nigh hopeless. It is so seldom solved that the seeker 
after clean air must turn more and more to the country 
and the open. If we are to regain our national vigor we 
must cultivate a genuine outdoor life. The present pop- 
ular movement in that direction is full of promise. 

Clean drinking-water is the second requisite of health. 
Bitter experience has taught our municipalities to be 
very solicitous in this matter, and we are perhaps better 
off now than ever before. But the danger of polluted 
water is still a menace of country life. Water may be 
fatally unclean and still look harmless. The only way 
is to have a careful and immediate examination, by 
sending a suitable sample to the State Chemist. One 
should first write ahead, and secure proper instructions 
for collecting the sample, as well as a sterilized con- 
tainer in which to ship it. Meanwhile, if there is the 
least suspicion of contamination, bottled spring water of 
known quality should be provided, even if the added 



BODY 77 

expense must be met by cutting out some other article 
of the daily dietary. Impure drinking-water carries too 
many grave dangers to justify running any risk either 
on the ground of economy or of over-trustfulness. One 
would not wish to go through life suspicious of every 
glass of water, but nevertheless it is wise to believe every 
untested water-supply guilty until proved innocent. 

It is not enough, however, to see that the drinking- 
water is harmless, — one must also see that it is used. 
Few parents or teachers concern themselves with the 
amount of water their children drink ; and in point 
of fact few children drink as much as they ought. It is 
a matter of habit, and one gets into bad habits in this 
respect, even more easily than into good habits. Very 
small children are fairly insistent upon having a drink 
when they are thirsty, and often at very inconvenient 
times and seasons ; but as they grow older, they learn to 
do without, especially if the supply is not at hand, or 
if their demands are apt to meet with expostulation 
on the part of their elders. We are quite horrified at 
the idea of a child's not having a daily bath, because 
that necessity of the cleanly life has been pretty well 
drilled into us, and we realize how unwillingly we would 
forego such a bath ourselves ; but we do not sufficiently 
remember that the inside of the body needs cleansing 
just as much as the outside, and that the work should 
be done thoroughly. Abundant drinking-water means 
free urination and easy movements of the bowels, and 
the consequent elimination of waste materials. Just how 
much water shall be taken each day depends upon sev- 
eral factors, such as perspiration and the amount of 
water in the rest of the food. Fresh fruits and milk sup- 
ply in themselves a large amount of water. In general 



78 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

it may be said that under ordinary conditions a child of 
twelve should drink at least two full quarts of water a day. 
Few children do this, but the habit once established, an 
important step has been taken towards increased clean- 
ness, and consequently increased health. 

The proper care of the teeth should also be brought 
within the certainty of a well-established habit. At 
least once a day, and preferably once after each meal, 
a child should be taught to brush his teeth and wash 
out his mouth. If at the same time he gargles his throat 
thoroughly with cold water, or water to which some 
suitable disinfectant has been added, the danger of 
sore throat and other infection will be notably reduced. 

The need of frequent baths and pure drinking-water 
is very great, but it is now so obvious that the need is 
in a fair way of being satisfied. In the matter of food, 
the need of cleanness is just as imperative, but our 
quest of it is much less persistent and intelligent. We 
have come to many well-established ideas of external 
delicacy. We require clean linen on our table, and clean- 
looking china and glass and silver. In the matter of 
the food itself, we have attained an altogether superfi- 
cial and ineffectual squeamishness. We draw the line 
at any overt and visible act of contamination. A break- 
fast roll that has fallen on the floor, or a portion of food 
into which we have seen the waiter, or even our gracious 
hostess, push inquiring fingers would meet with our 
prompt and well-bred refusal ; but the dreadful things 
that have happened to the food during its production 
and preparation — at the market, in transit, in our own 
kitchens even — give us no great concern. We do not see 
these contaminations, and they are quite too disagree- 
able to think about. Things that we would not for one 



BODY 79 

moment tolerate in our presence, we permit without pro- 
test, behind our backs. The host who helped us to a 
second piece of roast with his own fork would hardly be 
surprised to see that we had suddenly lost all relish 
for roast ; yet in the kitchen the cook dips her spoon in- 
to the soup to taste its seasoning, and, later, dips again. 
The one step we have taken in securing cleanness of 
food is to insist that in our presence nothing offensive 
shall be done, and this adds a bit to the superficial de- 
cency of life, but it is a very short step towards genuine 
cleanness and health. - 

At all stages in its preparation, unclean hands are in 
constant contact with our food. In our own kitchens 
unclean negroes, Orientals, immigrants of all nations 
handle our food with careless unconcern. Our only es- 
cape is the escape of the ostrich who buries her head in 
the sand, — we do not allow ourselves to know about 
these matters, or our thoughts to dwell upon them. If 
we did give rein to our imagination, a banana, a pared 
apple, and a boiled egg would be about the only forms 
of food open to us. 

In reality the partaking of food ought to be a sacra- 
ment. It is the daily renewal of our life for noble ends. 
This sacrament ought not to be left to unclean hands, 
for it means the desecration of our own hearthstones. 
When we partake of impure, unclean food, when we over- 
eat, as we are constantly solicited to do, we put away 
from us in effect that perfect cleanness which makes for 
health. I am not speaking theoretically, — I am speak- 
ing in full earnest. I have been now in every state in the 
Union, I have been in hundreds of hotels and boarding- 
houses and private homes, I have traveled in ordinary 
coaches as well as in Pullmans, and I have watched my 



80 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

fellow-countrymen with a keen and friendly interest. 
On all sides I have seen the signs of this uncleanness, — 
I have seen it in sallow complexions, dull eyes, flabby 
cheeks, in distressing figures, and heavy, uncouth move- 
ments. This is the testimony of the eye. But the ear 
adds its own witness. Few travelers given to the most 
rudimentary observation have failed to detect that cu- 
rious and unmistakable sound, — the sigh of the over- 
fed. I have heard it on steamships and dining-cars, in 
hotels and private houses, and I know very well what 
it means, — it means lumpish manners and dull talk. 
A sacrament means refreshment and added life. But 
this meal of unclean food and gross amount requires a 
lounge or a sprawling armchair in which to recover one's 
breath, and drowse off the effect of the gluttony. Both 
eye and ear are offended, and if we are willing to ac- 
cept the testimony of Chinese critics, the nose as well. 
They object to us, they say, for many reasons, and one 
of them is, quite frankly, that we smell. 

I cannot but feel it to be a mockery of a shocking 
sort that education should concern itself with so many 
unimportant matters, and should leave untouched these 
essential matters of elementary cleanness. But it is not 
my business to upbraid. It is my business to point out 
these evils and to suggest a better practice. The remedy 
is very simple. It is to abolish uncleanness by bring- 
ing in cleanness. Each parent and teacher is bound to 
attain cleanness for himself, in person, in drink, and in 
food, to establish it in the children, and to teach its 
high importance as a vital element in the health and 
integrity of the nation. Personally I do not believe that 
we shall ever attain cleanness in food, so long as we 
leave this important matter to servants and hirelings. 



BODY 81 

How can we, for example, expect a negro servant, who 
is sensibly unclean in his own person, to be even mod- 
erately clean when it comes to handling our food? In 
point of fact we do not expect it, and that is one rea- 
son why we keep out of the kitchen. The partaking of 
food can only once more become a sacrament when its 
preparation is in clean hands, in the hands of the mis- 
tress or master of the house, or in the hands of an equal 
member of the household, whose high office is recognized 
and respected. 

There are grave democratic objections to the serv- 
ant class ; there are grave religious objections ; the hy- 
gienic objections are equally grave. It is for educators 
to realize this and to teach both boys and girls the im- 
mense importance of temperance and cleanness in food 
and drink, and how practically to attain them. From 
an individual point of view, and from a national point 
of view, such knowledge is of vastly more importance 
than any attainment of a purely academic sort. 

In this educational quest of cleanness, it is easily 
possible to over-concentrate one's attention upon one 
particular point, and to neglect others equally impor- 
tant. We all know worthy persons who are fanatical 
about pure drinking-water, or solicitous to the point of 
being tiresome in the matter of the milk-supply, but 
who accept without question unmentionable scandals 
in the way of other food and drink. The truth is that 
dirt threatens us on all sides, — in the air we breathe, 
in the water we drink, in the food we eat, — and will 
probably continue to do so as long as human welfare 
is accounted a secondary matter and industrial profit is 
held to be the major concern. But we must go on fight- 
ing clirt on all sides, and, in order not to be defeated, 



82 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

we must fight with cheerful courage, not afraid of the 
enemy and bent upon downing him. There is no limit 
to the fight. It must take in everything, — clothing 
and human habitations, streets and cars, schoolhouses 
and all assembly halls, as well as air and food and drink. 
Most decent persons would be shocked at the idea 
of wearing any clothing next to the skin that could not 
go unreservedly into the washtub. It may be that, in 
well-to-do families, the prejudice in favor of fresh under- 
wear is carried to an extreme, and does not sufficiently 
take into account the waste of human life that goes on 
in all laundries. It used to seem to me an admirable 
thing to change every day or even twice a day, and I 
was ready to measure a man's decency by the size of 
his laundry-bill ; but I do not feel so any longer, for I 
see that for even fresh linen we may pay too high a 
price in the dull, unwholesome labor of our brothers and 
sisters. If we washed our own clothes we would cer- 
tainly cultivate temperance in the size of our laundry- 
bags. So I no longer admire a full clothes-line, for my 
thought goes out to the men and especially to the 
women who wearily pin the clothes to the line. But one 
can be temperate in this respect and yet perfectly clean 
and decent. The way out is through a scrupulous clean- 
ness of the body itself. This is genuine decency and in- 
volves no slavery on the part of others. A vigorous 
bath once a day surely, and twice a day when heat or 
toil makes it advisable, is a much better social ceremo- 
nial than the excessive service at the washtub. Men and 
women who live cleanly lives can keep their bodies as 
fresh and sweet as the bodies of little children. One 
practical reason for advocating the nakedness of chil- 
dren is that skin bathed in sunshine and fresh air, as 



BODY 83 

well as in water, is always clean and wholesome. But 
just as we fuss over the drinking-water and the milk- 
supply, and quite ignore the hideous uncleanness in the 
preparation of solid food, so, in this matter of clothing, 
we are excessively fastidious about our linen, and yet 
tolerate a surprising amount of dirt in our outer clothes. 
If we are careful gentles, we have our coats and our 
waistcoats and our trousers pressed from time to time, 
and from time to time we may even have them naphtha- 
cleansed. But for the most part, they are far from clean. 
The more careful we are, the better cloth we buy, and 
the longer it lasts, and the more filthy and ill-smelling 
it becomes. A rich man told me the other day that the 
suit he had on was six years old. My own nose is per- 
haps over-sensitive, but many men whom I know to be 
scrupulously clean in their person and linen, I never- 
theless hold at a distance because their outer clothes 
fairly smell. The rooms in an old hotel get what Emer- 
son called the " carpet-smell," and it is the same with 
outer garments that wear too long. One charm of the 
tropics is that both men and women wear wash clothes, 
and do not in this respect offend. One of the many 
charms about little children is that all their clothes 
have been in the wash tub, and are really clean. One 
element in the wholesomeness and delight of the life 
at a summer camp is that the little clothing worn goes 
frequently into the washtub, and one has on all sides 
both the sense and the smell of essential cleanness. We 
shall never be a genuinely clean and wholesome people 
until we devise some scheme of clothing in which every 
garment worn by men and women, as well as by chil- 
dren, is not only clean once, but is easily kept clean. 
I am dwelling so long upon this unpleasant topic 



84 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

because it has never received the attention which it 
deserves. There is, I think, in all the outer world no 
more insidious and invading vulgarity than a bad odor. 
One meets it wherever any considerable number of hu- 
man beings are gathered together, and this quite regard- 
less of their social standing. If these foul emanations 
come from unsuitable clothing, or bad teeth, or impure 
food, or unclean personal habits, it is quite clear that we 
have to do with persons who cannot, in spite of their 
pretensions, be called educated. There is a disposition 
to look down upon our Oriental brother, but in this 
matter of personal cleanliness he stands measurably 
above ourselves. 

Cleanness in human habitations has made a great 
stride during the past quarter of a century. Bare floors, 
painted walls, open fireplaces, generous open plumbing, 
electric lighting, unupholstered furniture, uncurtained 
beds, scantily draped windows, temperate bric-a-brac, 
have added much to the hygiene of the home. One 
particular menace still remains, and that is the dirt- 
distributing gaspipe. Not only does the burning jet 
bring soot and the foul products of combustion into 
the atmosphere of our apartments, but the pipes them- 
selves are always leaky. I have in mind a handsome 
old house in Boston, where the stately mistress has re- 
cently been ill unto death. Her physician traced the 
cause of illness directly to the gaspipes. They had 
been in the house for thirty years, and, though show- 
ing no appreciable leaks, they were found to be perme- 
ated with innumerable pinholes, through which the gas 
was constantly fouling the atmosphere of the house, 
and making health impossible. The present tendency 
to substitute electric lighting for gas is a great gain, 



BODY 85 

but unfortunately it goes hand in hand with an equally 
marked tendency in the kitchen to substitute gas for 
coal. If properly managed, this is a great convenience, 
but generally it is not properly managed, for either the 
gas itself or the products of combustion, or both, are 
allowed to escape into the room. I seldom enter a house 
or an apartment without smelling sewer gas, or illum- 
inating gas, or coal gas. No habitation can be con- 
sidered clean where the very atmosphere is contaminated 
with this mobile form of dirt. 

On all sides, informed public opinion is demanding 
better ventilation and greater cleanness in school- 
houses, churches, lecture-halls, theaters, and railway 
cars. It is difficult to reduce such matters to statistics, 
but the marked increase in scholarship recorded in the 
open-air schools of Chicago would indicate that here 
again cleanness in atmosphere must figure as an im- 
portant element in the scientific management of our 
schools. 

In making disease synonymous with dirt, and health 
synonymous with cleanness, we must bear in mind that 
there is a dirt of the spirit as well as a dirt of the 
body ; and there is a cleanness of the spirit which is 
of all known forces the most powerful in bringing 
about the cleanness and health of the body. The hin- 
drances in the life of the spirit are to be removed with 
even greater assiduity than we eliminate dirt from the 
life of the body. Let all things that breathe — toith- 
out enemies, without obstacles, overcoming sorrow and 
attaining cheerfulness — move forward freely , each in 
his own path ! If we parents and teachers could realize 
this simple, far-reaching prayer, cleansing our own 
spirits, we should appreciate the sacred ness of the per- 



86 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

sonality of our children, and we should be able to help 
them move forward freely, each in his own path. And 
this is education, — the unfolding and perfecting of 
the individual human spirit. When the spiritual ob- 
stacles are removed, it is in the clear atmosphere of 
the untrammeled spirit that the children blossom into 
larger human beings. It is convenient to speak of the 
human body first, but we must always remember that 
it is the spirit which must first be cleansed, because it 
is the spirit which is the source of life, and which uses 
for its efficient tool, the body. 



VI 

THE YEARS OF GRACE 

The integrity of the human body is the first step in 
education. We must be scientific and thoroughgoing. 
We must be willing to deal with the naked bodies of 
our children in the same unashamed way that a mother 
deals with the little naked body of her infant. We 
must watch these little childish bodies just as carefully, 
must weigh and measure them, must compare them to 
normal standards of growth, and make good any de- 
ficiency or cut down any excess. I have given at the 
end of the chapter a table of the heights and weights of 
normal children of different ages. This is, of course, a 
very mechanical test, but it is helpful and may easily 
prove important. A parent or teacher should know 
whether the boy he is pretending to educate is growing 
normally, increasing wholesomely in stature and bulk. 
And he should know many other things having to do 
most vitally with the boy's future : whether he is mal- 
formed in any way ; whether, for example, he is flat- 
footed, or has any appreciable curvature of the spine, 
or whether there is any defective action of the heart. 
It ought to be known, too, whether the different organs 
are acting properly ; whether the circulation is all that 
it should be; whether the urination is free and ade- 
quate; whether the bowels move regnlarly; whether 
the digestion is in order. Then there is that important 
and too-little considered question, — the condition of 
. the sense-organs. A child only knows the outer world 



88 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

through the senses, and if they fail to function prop- 
erly, the report is a very faulty one. It is the grave 
business of parent and teacher to know whether a boy 
is all right in this particular, whether his eyes are sound, 
or perhaps need glasses or other treatment ; whether his 
ears are acute ; whether his nose and throat are in order; 
whether his nervous and muscular system is sound. 

These things used to be taken for granted, but when 
it has recently been shown that out of fifteen hundred 
school-children examined in the city of New York, ninety- 
three per cent were defective in some particular, it is 
no longer permissible to take these for granted. It is our 
business to find out where the defect in each child lies, 
and our moral obligation to correct the defect if that is 
possible. This is vastly more important than to impart 
any amount of knowledge in the way of arithmetic and 
grammar. 

Not only do the facts of actual observation acquaint 
us with this wide-spread deterioration, but there are 
scientific grounds for expecting it. It is the tendency of 
all highly organized matter to deteriorate. It is the sim- 
ple things which endure, sand and water and air. The 
complex molecules are unstable, and if they contain 
some unwilling element, like nitrogen, they are un- 
stable to the point of being explosive. The most com- 
plex organism in the world is a highly developed man. 
Instability is the price of his wonderful organization. 
As a child, he needs to be safeguarded ; as a man, he 
needs to safeguard himself. If his organization reach 
the high pitch of genius, he needs almost a personal 
care-taker. We must not be appalled at the tendency of 
the modern, highly organized child to degenerate. We 
must accept this tendency as the price of his marvelous 



THE YEARS OF GRACE 89 

mechanism, and must resist the tendency to the best of 
our ability. 

To watch and measure the childish organism, to de- 
tect, and so far as may be, correct defects, to develop 
the sense-organs, and to keep the organism as a whole 
in perfect health, — this is the large mission of the 
parent and teacher. How far one will call upon expert 
advice and how far one will depend upon one's self will 
be determined by circumstances. An earnest parent or 
teacher will go just as far personally as he can go with 
safety. If he is intelligent, he will easily know the proper 
limits of his own skill and just where the expert be- 
comes necessary. A suitable weighing-machine and meas- 
uring-tape, used in connection with the given table every 
one, two, or three months, will determine the general 
question of growth. A man who genuinely cares for 
boys need not be a physician to tell, on looking a boy 
over carefully, whether there are any marked defects to 
be corrected. Even in the delicate matters of sight and 
hearing, though experts would be better, the man who 
cares can single out the cases which need immediate at- 
tention, and can see that they get it even though all the 
children cannot be submitted to expert examination. I 
have personally great respect for expert service, but I 
have even greater respect for the man who brings to his 
work with children the combined magic of love and 
common sense. This is particularly true when it comes 
to acting upon a diagnosis. The scientist may find his 
chief interest in locating a defect. The concern of the 
parent and teacher is to correct it, 

It is a large art to keep children in perfect health. 
When one has attained the utmost cleanness possible, 
cleanness of atmosphere, of person, of drinking-water, 



90 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

of food, of clothing, of habitation, of spirit, the ques* 
tions of detail still remain, — how much sleep, how much 
food and drink, how much clothing, how much work, 
how much exercise, how much play. In spite of my own 
large experience in such matters, — or perhaps because of 
it, — I should be quite unwilling to attempt any hard- 
and-fast rules. The proper apportionment of the day 
will depend upon the climatic conditions, upon the sea- 
son of the year, upon the resources of the locality, upon 
the needs of the individual boy. I will give in some de- 
tail the outline and results of two experiments of my 
own, one in California and one in New Hampshire. I 
would not for a single moment offer either programme 
as a finality, or even recommend its un revised adoption 
elsewhere, but they will serve as practical material for 
critical study, and may be so fortunate as to suggest 
something better. 

In California, we had eighteen boys under our care 
and a total household of twenty-seven persons. The 
school season was just eight months long, from the first 
of October to the first of June. Some of the boys came 
to us primarily for their health, and practically all were 
en route for college. We pitched our tents — or, more 
literally, built our bungalows — on a glorious plateau 
midway between the desert and the sea, and within sight 
of the snow mountains. The ranch of nine hundred acres 
varied in height, but the school site was about seventeen 
hundred feet above the sea. We were a dozen miles 
from any considerable town. This had its inconven- 
iences, but also its large advantage. We all rose at half- 
after six, and made a simple toilet. At seven we had 
early breakfast. This consisted of cocoa and toast for 
the boys, and if they preferred it, coffee and toast for 



THE YEARS OF GRACE 91 

the masters. The boys then made their beds and put 
their quarters in order for the day. Chapel in the big 
hall came at quarter of eight, and then, from eight until 
quarter-past ten there were three lesson periods of forty- 
five minutes each. At twenty minutes after ten we had 
our regular breakfast, a substantial three-course meal of 
fruit, cereal, and entree. It was a leisurely meal and 
accompanied by much talk. When we rose from the 
table, about eleven, the boys went directly to the stable 
and cleaned their horses and stalls. Each boy had his 
own horse and took entire charge of it, except the early 
morning feeding. It was found wiser to have the stable- 
man attend to this, as there are practical objections to 
going directly from the stable to the schoolroom. When 
the boys finished their stable duties, it was nearly noon, 
and usually warm enough for the boys to strip and have 
a cold outdoor shower bath in the tonic California sun- 
shine. This brought them fresh and clean to the school- 
rooms for three more lesson periods, — from twelve to 
quarter-past two. Then came a most informal stand-up 
lunch, fruit and some simple biscuit or cake. Most of 
the boys were ready for a bite, but a few preferred not 
to eat. The rest of the afternoon was spent outdoors. 
The boys practiced jumping their horses over rudely 
constructed and not too resistant barriers, or rode to 
neighboring points of interest, or played tennis, or wan- 
dered in small groups over the surrounding immensity. 
There was no danger of getting lost, for it is an open 
country and the sentinel mountains always pointed the 
way home. By five o'clock the flock came trooping back. 
During the day the dress was very informal, flannel 
shirts or sweaters with khaki trousers, and in the warmer 
months simply sleeveless jerseys and cotton running- 



92 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

trousers. But all dressed for the half-after five dinner. 
I do not mean that we put on dinner coats and expan- 
sive shirt-fronts, but merely that we all freshened up in 
some simple fashion. The small boys put on fresh sailor 
suits and the older boys got into their sack coats and 
stiff collars. By this time the lamps and candles were 
lighted, and we all had that pleasant sense of relaxation 
and leisure which comes at the end of a busy, well-spent 
day. I remember these dinners with particular pleasure. 
I do not recall so much what we had to eat, except that 
in a simple way it was good and wholesome, a plain four- 
course dinner of soup, substantial, a salad, and a simple 
dessert. But the dinners remain in such vivid memory 
because they were what all dinners ought to be, genuine 
festivals of good-fellowship. We had a merry, happy 
time, and we all fell into the habit of looking forward 
to the dinner hour. Perhaps four times a week we had 
meat or fish ; the other three dinners were avowedly 
vegetarian. The food was prepared by a clean Chinese 
cook, but the boys took turns in waiting on the table. 
The matter is easily arranged when the meals are served 
strictly in courses. The little waiter found the table 
completely set, and sat down with the rest of us. He 
brought in the several courses and removed the dishes, 
but he ate his meal with us, as the plates were helped 
by the master and passed from boy to boy. In this way 
one may dispense with servants, and still be decent and 
orderly. 

I am dwelling in such detail upon these simple coun- 
try dinners, because I have come to accept the Eastern 
idea that the partaking of food is a sacrament, and that 
it is a badly spent day which does not have some such 
festival near its close. 



THE YEARS OF GRACE 93 

After dinner we gathered around the fire in the big 
hall and were sociable until seven, with music, games, 
or talk. The older boys had a study period from seven 
until nine, and then — if they wished it — a glass of 
milk and a biscuit. The little boys went to bed between 
half-after seven and eight. By ten, the lights were gen- 
erally out all around, and the silence of our vast pla- 
teau was once more undisturbed. This scheme of meals 
— two substantial meals and three snacks — I found 
in vogue on a large sugar plantation in Cuba where I 
once spent a happy month. It suited the California 
conditions admirably. We might have modified it an- 
other year, and made other changes in the daily pro- 
gramme. Even in household matters experience is the 
prize teacher. But the plan seems to me worth stating 
because of its very favorable results. During the entire 
school year of eight months, with a household of twenty- 
seven persons, some of whom were very delicate and 
were out there primarily for their health, we did not 
once have to call in a physician. The wonderful Cali- 
fornia climate is, of course, partly responsible for this 
excellent showing, but the climate that year was not at 
its best, — it was, in fact, the worst, they said, in thirty 
years ; so I am disposed to believe that our phenomenal 
good health was largely due to elective causes. 
fc In New Ham}3shire the conditions are quite different. 
We have a regular summer camp for boys, and as the 
entire session covers only two months, — July and Au- 
gust, — we are obliged to gain our results by somewhat 
quick methods. But they are capable of adaptation, 
and could, with suitable modifications, be carried out 
anywhere, and during the entire year. The estate cov- 
ers about two hundred acres, and borders upon a most 



94 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

useful lake, one whose clear waters offer ideal condi- 
tions for swimming and diving, and whose surface is 
sufficiently large for boating and canoeing. The camp 
site is about sixteen hundred feet above the sea. In 
reality, the camp is a small village of about eight or 
nine buildings and as many tents. As these are out of 
sight of the road, and visitors are bidden on but one 
afternoon of the week, the conditions are under control 
to an unusual extent. Any failure to gain results would 
be, I think, wholly our own fault. We have, as a rule, 
from eighty to ninety boys, and a total household of 
considerably over a hundred persons. It is true that the 
session is short, — just nine weeks, — but when you 
live with a boy for that length of time, and during the 
entire twenty-four hours, you -have a vastly more com- 
plete knowledge of him than could be gained in several 
years of the less intimate life of a day school. One could 
ask for no better laboratory for the study of boyhood. 
In addition, we have, of course, the group system, and 
that makes the study still more individual and com- 
plete. Each master has seven boys under his charge. 
He becomes for the time their elder brother. He sleeps 
with them, eats with them, swims with them, works 
with them, plays with them, until by the end of the 
summer he knows them as few of their own fathers 
know them. The little fellows sleep in cabins, and the 
older boys in tents. They all come to the Main Cabin, 
a roomy Swiss chalet, for their meals, lessons, chapel, 
music, and community life generally. At table, the 
group system is still maintained, so that the master 
can concern himself with the manners of his boys as 
well as with their general welfare and their morals. 
A day at camp would run about as follows : the 



THE YEARS OF GRACE 95 

rising-bell sounds at seven, and all are supposed to turn 
out promptly. The boys generally sleep naked, wrapped 
in their blankets, and are at once ready for the morn- 
ing bath. This consists of a cold, open-air shower. If a 
boy is somewhat delicate and has not been accustomed 
to cold baths, it may be necessary to go slowly. As 
the master takes his own shower at the same time as 
his boys, he can readily determine in any particular 
case whether the shock is too great. The test is very 
simple, — it is how the boy reacts. If the lips and finger- 
nails turn blue it is quite clear that the circulation is 
poor and that the boy must be watched. He must begin 
with a shower every other day and perhaps in the 
warmer part of the afternoon. But if a lad comes out 
rosy and smiling, thoroughly awake and eager for the 
day's adventure, the cold shower may be considered an 
immediate success. In combination with sunshine and 
fresh air, the tonic effect is soon noticeable. Besides 
the morning bath, a boy must attend to three other 
matters before he is technically " ready " for breakfast, 
— he must brush his teeth, arrange his hair, and clean 
his finger-nails. If the master suspects any omissions, 
he asks if the boy is ready ; if not ready, he is excused 
from the table until the deficiency is made good. These 
are small matters, and the reader may be impatient with 
me for dwelling upon them, but it does not do to take 
them for granted. In two large institutions which I 
visited during the present year, one of them splendidly 
conducted and one of them very badly, I asked whether 
there was any one in the establishment who hieio 
whether a particular boy had taken a bath that morn- 
ing, or brushed his teeth, or tidied his finger-nails, and 
was answered in the negative. It is not considered 



96 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

manners to ask these primitive questions of well-bred 
boys, but it would better be, for they are sometimes 
quite as careless as the less fortunate. And meanwhile 
it is highly important that good habits be forming. 

Clothing at the camp is voluntary and depends en- 
tirely upon the weather. On a warm morning few boys 
will don more than a single garment, — a pair of run- 
ning-trousers, or a pair of bathing-trunks. Some may 
prefer not to wear any clothing. This nakedness is not 
only permitted, but encouraged, on both physical and 
moral grounds. Experience has shown that sunshine 
and fresh air are the best possible tonics for growing 
bodies, and it is held to be desirable that a boy shall 
be naked and unashamed. 

The boys wait on the tables themselves. As there are 
seven boys in a group, and the waiter serves all day, 
this means that each boy takes his turn one day a week. 
The waiter must get over to the dining-room ten min- 
utes before meal-time, so as to set his table. He finds 
a pile of dishes ready for him in the serving-room, to- 
gether with the necessary silver and other adjuncts. 
Each section has a strong wooden tray (made in the 
manual training shop), and this is capacious enough to 
make but one trip to the serving-room necessary. In 
the case of the very little fellows the tray is carried in 
for them by one of the older pages. The tables are made 
of four wide planks of selected Michigan pine and are 
always used bare. The napkins are of white crepe paper, 
and dispense with a hopeless amount of laundry work. 
The table furniture is all carefully chosen. The china 
is blue and white ; the pitchers and bowls are a good 
brown ; the glasses are shapely ; the silver is unobtrusive. 
In spite of its simplicity, therefore, the little waiter can 



THE YEARS OF GRACE 97 

make his table look very attractive. On special occasions 
he spreads a napkin under each plate and adds a few- 
flowers or ferns. I try to be in the room while these active 
sun-tanned little cherubs are setting their tables. It is 
a pretty sight, for the final eager look with which they 
scrutinize their work to see that all is right bears wit- 
ness to the fact that education is in progress. They are 
learning to do something useful and to do it with order- 
liness and precision. A few minutes later, when the 
first bell rings, we all assemble at our places and at the 
sound of the final bell, all sit down. 

We have the Quaker grace, — a moment of silence. 
I am not sure that all my boys give thanks, — indeed, 
being boys, I am reasonably sure that the majority of 
them do not ; but nevertheless that moment of silence 
gives dignity to the meal and converts it into a sacra- 
ment. 

And now from each table a small messenger — Mer- 
cury in miniature — flies to the serving-room and brings 
in the first course, fresh fruit or melon. He sits down 
and eats with the rest. In this way he suffers no disad- 
vantage beyond the loss of part of the conversation. 
The master serves from his end of the table, and the 
plates are passed from boy to boy. There is great free- 
dom in the way of conversation, and a fair amount of 
noise, but there is also a required formality in the way 
of elementary good manners. No boy begins to eat until 
all are served, and the master lifts his own fork or 
spoon ; no boy reaches in front of another ; when a dish 
is passed, the boy takes it before helping himself, or, if 
he declines, he either receives the dish and puts it down, 
or else touches it courteously if that be the fitter ac- 
knowledgment. Habits in these little matters soon be- 



98 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

come established. I have observed with amusement that 
in declining a second helping of soup, a boy will some- 
times unconsciously touch the plate before him. A boy's 
impulse to throw things and to lay hands on his neigh- 
bor are both very strong, but both, in the interest of 
orderliness, must be strictly prohibited, and if need be, 
penalized. If, occasionally, a boy on one side of the 
table suddenly sits up with a start while a boy on the 
opposite side looks blissfully happy, it is easy to guess 
that a little cold water may have been thrown under 
the table. But a wise master is one who at times is ju- 
diciously blind. 

When the first course is finished, the waiter rises and 
carries out the dishes, the master and the other boys 
helping him stack them on the wooden tray. Here, as 
elsewhere, he is expected to be cooperative. A disorderly 
tray involves useless work in the serving-room, and 
is discouraged by suitable Spencerian penalties. The 
waiter brings in the next course, sits down, and eats it 
with the rest. He goes out and gets " seconds," if they 
are needed. Another boy may volunteer this service 
of replenishment, the only rule being that but one boy 
may be absent from the table at once. At the end of the 
third course, the waiter clears off everything, the nap- 
kins are gathered and placed in a waste-paper basket 
to be burned, the tables are brushed off (or wiped off 
with cloth or napkin, in case anything has been spilled), 
and everything is in perfect order when the camp rises 
from table. All is ceremonious and orderly, and when 
these qualities are rightly understood, the boys them- 
selves come to realize that in the end ceremony and or- 
der add to one's freedom and happiness ; in a word, that 
even in these small affairs of life there is a suitable, dig- 



THE YEARS OF GRACE 99 

nified mode of procedure which is vastly more agreeable 
than the disorder and confusion into which the care- 
lessly minded too easily fall. 

I have dwelt at such length upon these details of the 
meal because the matter seems to me of large educa- 
tional importance. The act is repeated over a thousand 
times a year, and for that reason alone would be quite 
worth idealizing. In addition, our table manners give 
color to the rest of the day's doings, and become a sig- 
nificant element in the conduct of life. Our American 
table manners, it must be confessed, leave much to be 
desired. In Europe, if the man opposite to you in hotel 
or pension omits to say " Good-morning," you may be 
pretty sure that he is an American. As a rule, our boys 
have a characteristic contempt for manners. This is be- 
cause they too often look upon them as silly conven- 
tions which might just as well have been otherwise had 
muddle-headed grown-ups so ordered. But when you 
show a boy that true courtesy, true manners, depend 
upon a nice consideration for others, and are a part of 
the respect which a gentleman owes to himself, — no- 
blesse oblige, — you quite easily win him over to your 
side. 

It might be thought that a hundred nearly naked 
boys gathered at bare pine tables, ungraced by the 
presence of the superior sex, would seem more like a 
crowd of young barbarians at play than a company of 
youthful gentlemen. But in reality it is the latter im- 
pression which ultimately prevails. In the first place, 
the costume is not so careless as it sounds. A boy may 
appear without any clothing, if he wishes, but he may 
not appear in any garment that was meant to be cov- 
ered up ; may not wear pyjamas or bathrobe ; may not 



100 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

substitute an undershirt for a jersey ; may not wear a 
shirt without a collar ; may not omit a coat over either 
waistcoat or suspenders. This prevents any appearance 
of rowdyism, and, in reality, a naked boy — clean, sun- 
tanned, erect — does not strike one as undressed, any 
more than a Greek statue makes such an impression. 
The human body is so valued in art, not alone because 
of its possible beauty, but also because of its immense 
power of expression. After seventeen summers in a 
boys' camp, I feel that I hardly know whether a boy is 
really fine and well-bred until I have seen him naked, 
for character sticks out of every curve, every shoulder- 
blade, every posture, every movement. It is only when 
a boy is naked that you can tell whether or not he is 
genuinely a thoroughbred. What we parents and 
teachers must work for is this entire fineness of texture 
in our boys. 

And in the second place, the bare tables and simple 
wooden walls are not barbarous. The tables are spot- 
lessly clean, and the color of the natural wood harmon- 
izes well with the china and table furniture. The 
chairs are of the simplest kitchen pattern, but instead 
of being speckled yellow shellac, they are painted a 
warm moss green. The walls are unplastered, but be- 
tween the rough studding there are shelves of friendly 
books. There is, of course, a beauty of magnificence 
and elaboration, a beauty of jewels and craftsmanship, 
of damask and embroidery, but there is also the simple 
and abiding beauty of form and color, and this is open 
to any one who has in him the soul of apprehension. 
Beauty is, after all, a spiritual quality, and no amount 
of magnificence and elaboration is able to capture it if 
the soul of the builder is itself steeped in poverty. One 



THE YEARS OF GRACE 101 

would not wish to fail in appreciation of all the subtle 
beauty in rare craftsmanship and art, but it has always 
seemed to me the greater victory when with very simple, 
inexpensive material one creates results of genuine and 
abiding beauty. 

Boys are rather inarticulate souls, and not much 
given to any expression on matters of art, but never- 
theless they are curiously sensitive to the subtle beauty 
and effect of the right form and color, and, especially 
at night, to the magic of well-disposed light. 

It is true that the best women are always missed, 
and any company is the poorer for their absence. And 
yet a summer camp is, I think, better off without them, 
for the life is so much simpler and freer. It is also to 
be remarked that in the best men there is a distinctly 
feminine element, one that may advantageously be 
cultivated, without any loss of manliness. " Strength 
and gentleness : men have cultivated the one, and 
women the other, — do thou cultivate both." This is 
the type of man needed in all boys' schools, and espe- 
cially in summer camps and residence schools, — men 
who are strong, clean, virile, but at the same time 
gentle and loving. It is a type that the best of our 
universities are increasingly turning out. But even a 
monastic camp is not devoid of genuine and valuable 
womanly influence. It comes in the home letters and 
memories, in the camp teaching of loyalty to the home, 
with the scores of women on visitors' afternoon, and 
with the gracious guests who dine at camp of a Sun- 
day evening and afterwards listen to beautiful music 
in the chapel. 

Immediately after breakfast, the boys make up their 
bunks and put the group quarters in order. At nine 



102 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

they all attend chapel. The service is very simple, and 
is, of course, non-sectarian. It represents, as far as 
possible, the spirit of the world-religion. We repeat 
the Lord's Prayer in unison, and follow it with a 
hymn. As the boys sit in chapel according to their 
voices, it is easily possible to have part singing. We 
use the Episcopal Hymnal, not because it always voices 
the modern religious consciousness, but because it does 
express in a very rich historic way the sentiment of 
worship and the best aspirations of the religious spirit. 
I know of no better collection. Then comes the read- 
ing of the daily lesson. This is chosen from the an- 
cient Greek or Hindu philosophers ; from Confucius 
or Zoroaster ; from the Old Testament ; from the New 
Testament, — especially from the practical St. Matthew ; 
from our modern essayists, and from the poets of all 
countries and ages. The lessons cover a wide range of 
spiritual experience, the one idea being to present a 
helpful, inspiring thought at the outset of the day's 
work, to encourage toleration and to bear witness to 
the catholicity of religion. The service closes with a 
second hymn and the notices of the day. 

I am myself a distinct believer in ceremonial, in 
good manners, in a somewhat formal etiquette, because 
I have found by experience that they add not only to 
the beauty and dignity of life, but also, in the end, to 
its freedom. I have noticed in traveling on English 
ships, even small ones in the Far East carrying only a 
handful of passengers, that the habit of dressing for 
dinner on the part of the officers, and the invariable 
Sunday habit of reading the Anglican service, add 
much to the general decency and orderliness of life on 
shipboard. It is particularly desirable in handling 



THE YEARS OF GRACE 103 

boys that there should be a temperate, genuine cere- 
monial, a required mannerliness, for then the day may 
be full of freedom, of primitive simplicity, of uncon- 
ventionality, without losing for a moment its dominant 
note of dignity and high-mindedness. 

After chapel comes the observation class. This is a 
local institution, which is, I think, worthy of imitation. 
It consists of a statement containing some hidden in- 
congruity, or a problem of some sort, or a confessed 
riddle, or an observation, genuinely reported and re- 
quiring explanation. The answers are volunteered, the 
floor being given, of course, to the first bidder. It re- 
quires some ingenuity to keep the ball rolling. When 
the master's stock is exhausted, he calls upon the differ- 
ent groups for a nut worth the cracking. If they suc- 
ceed in catching him, their boyish glee is only human. 
The whole thing takes only two or three minutes ; its 
object is to make us sit up and take notice, to be a bit 
quicker in our mental operations. 

Then comes the general singing lesson. The singing- 
master is a man of large experience and knowledge, but 
his major qualification is a rich barytone voice which 
he uses attractively and sympathetically. Here espe- 
cially it is the art that is wanted rather than the sci- 
ence. The exercises cover a somewhat wide range from 
simple scales and intervals to complete part singing. 
Many of our popular songs are not entirely free from 
objections, but there are any number of fine old English 
songs which are wholesome and very jolly. Sometimes 
the master sings the song himself and the boys come in 
on the refrain or in a rousing chorus. In two busy sum- 
mer months, one cannot make musicians, but with even 
fifteen minutes a day one can accomplish something 



104 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

worth while in the way of forming a musical taste, and 
in teaching a boy to appreciate good music. Even the 
negative service of creating a distaste for coon songs 
and other grotesques is amply worth while. Three young 
persons went abroad ; an interested friend thus described 
their several attitudes : one, she said, had taste ; one 
had, as yet, no taste ; the third had bad taste. We 
agreed as to which of the three would be the difficult 
one to deal with. 

It is now half-after nine, and the boys scatter for 
two lesson periods of forty-five minutes each, or for 
some occupation, — manual training, art work, nature 
study, music, or corrective gymnastics. The lessons 
cover the whole range of college requirements, and occa- 
sionally venture upon freshman or sophomore grounds. 
There are classes in Greek, Latin, French, German, 
English, Spanish, history, geography, science, mathe- 
matics from arithmetic to the calculus, — in anything, 
indeed, that a boy may want, and the collective wisdom 
of the fourteen or fifteen masters is able to supply. At 
eleven, the older boys are divided into two groups for 
the Swedish drill, and the little fellows go down to the 
lake for their swimming-lesson. The drill occupies some- 
thing less than thirty minutes, but we hold it to be a 
very valuable method of cultivating both health and 
will power. If well carried out, it is a strict discipline 
requiring complete silence and instant response to com- 
mand. The drill is given on an open dirt court, and 
necessitates no apparatus whatever. It involves sepa- 
rate movements of all parts of the body, — arms, legs, 
thighs, hands, feet, neck, head, shoulders, — and gene- 
ral movements of the body as a whole. The object of 
the drill is not only to exercise and develop the mus- 



THE YEARS OF GRACE 105 

cles, but also to give the boy entire control over his 
body and to make it the ready tool of the spirit. When 
a part of the body is named, he is expected to concen- 
trate his attention upon it ; when the movement is com- 
manded, he is expected to execute it instantly. If he 
selects the wrong member, the right arm, for example, 
instead of the left, or if his movement is in the wrong 
direction, he is reprimanded severely. It is not exercise 
that is wanted, but predetermined, directed exercise. 
The major caution in giving the drill is that it must 
never degenerate into mere imitation. The master, may 
illustrate the several movements as thoroughly as he 
likes, but when the boys are going through with them, 
the master must himself remain motionless. 

Down at the lake, the little fellows are learning to 
swim and to dive. Nature has been very kind to us in 
supplying an attractive cove with a pretty wooded 
island at the entrance which serves both as screen and 
as a convenient objective point for the swimming. Our 
experience here is daily confirmation of the importance 
of early organic training. Little boys of from ten to 
twelve are frequently taught to swim in from ten days 
to two weeks, and, before the summer is over, they 
swim across the lake, a full half-mile or more, accom- 
panied, of course, by a master and helper in a boat. 
On the other hand, boys of seventeen, in the afternoon 
class, take all summer to learn to swim, and even then 
— if the Celtic is permissible — they don't know how. 
It takes a second summer to make them really profi- 
cient, and it is only at the end of the second summer 
that they venture to swim across the lake. In fact, 
many of the older boys are never up to it. In addition 
to the swimming, considerable emphasis is put upon 



106 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

diving. Both are useful accomplishments, both are 
splendid exercise for all the muscles of the body, and 
last but not least, both are sources of intense boyish 
pleasure. The little boys only have school from half- 
after nine until eleven, so that they need not return to 
the Main Camp until luncheon at one. 

It is a small matter, but worth mentioning as typical 
of the detail into which a man must be willing to go if 
he really desires health for his boys, and that is the ques- 
tion of towels. It was found that the boys would get 
their* towels much too dirty before service, would use 
them interchangeably, and worst of all, would take them 
back to camp, still damp, around their necks or over 
their shoulders. This gave a crop of stiff necks and 
sore throats, which vanished at once when towels were 
prohibited. We now use the " air towel," which ex- 
plains itself. It is not only cleaner and more whole- 
some, but adds appreciably to one's independence. 

I might add, in passing, that we have also come to 
use the air towel for our dishes. They are placed on 
end in a simple frame and are left to dry in a natural 
current of air. By the next meal they are quite ready 
for use. The air towel saves a lot of time, and, unlike 
some other economies, gives a better result. Not only is 
the luster of the china and glass much brighter, but 
they are wholly free from any suspicion of that odor 
of sour dish-towels, which (among men-folks, at any 
rate) hovers over summer housekeeping. 

At half-past eleven, the older boys enter upon a sec- 
ond double period of lessons or occupations, and at ten 
minutes past one all gather for luncheon. For many 
years we yielded to the current prejudice that little 
people should dine in the middle of the day, and we 



THE YEARS OF GRACE 107 

had that dreary institution, — a midday dinner. For 
the past three years, however, we have been more sen- 
sible, and have had dinner at night. The argument for 
this plan is threefold. In the first place, the boys have 
their heaviest exercise in the afternoon, and their keenest 
appetite at night. In the'second place, the evening occu- 
pations are naturally quieter and more conducive to easy 
digestion. In the third place, the pleasant sense of lei- 
sure, the fresh costume, the magic of burning logs and 
lighted lamps and candles all conspire to make the even- 
ing meal the high festival of the day. The practical re- 
sults have been entirely satisfactory. The luncheon con- 
sists of an uncooked cereal, an entree, and a simple 
dessert, preferably of fresh fruit and biscuit. 

After luncheon, the boys scatter to their bunks for 
a half-hour rest period. The impossible task of going 
to sleep is not asked of them. It is only asked that 
they shall remain flat on their backs. In point of fact, 
the master commonly reads aloud, generally some good 
rattling story of adventure. The habit of reading aloud 
cannot be too highly commended. Nothing so binds a 
group together as to have some such community of in- 
tellectual interest. In selecting the reading it is only 
common sense to choose what the boys actually care 
for, rather than what we think they ought to care for. 
In reality boys are immense idealists. They require 
vastly more prowess and virtue in the hero of the tale 
than grown-ups do, especially grown-ups with a turn 
for realism and psychological analysis. But above all 
else, boys require that the hero shall do something, pref- 
erably something quite prodigious, and in an active 
young creature like a boy, this seems to me a perfectly 
healthy instinct. I once dropped into a German school, 



108 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

a famous one, and found a reading in progress, — a 
long, dull monotonous reading. The children sat on 
benches, outwardly decorous, but none of them suffi- 
ciently disloyal to childhood to be actually listening. I 
afterwards inquired the name of the author and learned 
that it was Schopenhauer ! I have the greatest admira- 
tion for German schools, and this incident, happily, is 
not typical. It is only typical of the strange aberrations 
to which the schoolmasterly mind is occasionally liable. 
In Porto Rico, on the other hand, I found the princi- 
ple of self-activity and participation carried to a delir- 
ious extreme. Under the old regime, the children recited 
their lessons in unison, the best scholar being the one 
of the most powerful lungs. The noise was extraordi- 
nary, and reached far beyond the schoolhouse. If it 
ceased for any appreciable interval, the alcalde sent 
around to see if the schoolmaster were shirking his 
duty. I permit myself this digression in order to point 
out that we parents and teachers, like mathematicians 
dealing with infinities and the fourth dimension, 
must always be ready to submit our results to that one 
infallible test, — the touchstone of common sense. 

The afternoons — from half-past two until half -past 
six — are given over to vigorous outdoor life — to tennis, 
basketball, baseball, track-running, hurdling, tramps, 
mountain-climbing, boating, canoeing, carpentry, hut- 
building, mimic adventures. At three, or later if a ball- 
game is scheduled, the older boys have their lesson in 
swimming and diving. Towards sunset, the boys begin 
to gravitate to the main chalet, and at half-after six 
dinner is ready. It is a simple, three-course meal, but 
served with all the allurement of light and color, and 
seasoned with good talk. It is a festival, and everything 



THE YEARS OF GRACE 109 

is done to heighten the festival spirit. If a small boy 
has a birthday, it is now that the birthday cake with 
the lighted candles is brought in, — one candle for each 
year, and a big candle to grow on. If the master has a 
particularly good story or pun, it is now that he springs 
it. The joyous duties of the day are over; it is now 
the season for leisure and good-fellowship. At first, one 
must work for this result. Man may be, as Aristotle 
long since observed, a social animal, but under stress 
of modern life and the curse of self-consciousness, his 
sociability is often latent. One must begin by making 
the physical conditions right. In this big dining-room, 
for example, the noise would be intolerable if no steps 
were taken to diminish it. The mere fact that the boys 
are either barefooted or wear sneakers removes one 
large cause of noise. Another easy provision is hav- 
ing the actual dining-tables arranged around the edge 
of the room, — a fringe of noise. In the center there 
is a large unused table covered with books and flowers 
and bearing two tall brass candlesticks. When at night 
the candles are lighted, the table has all the appearance 
of an altar, and such, indeed, it is, — an altar to silence. 
It makes conversation possible in the surrounding 
fringe of noise. Another year, we may screw rubber 
knobs on the bottom of the chair-legs ; the tables them- 
selves are too heavy to yield to any ordinary boyish 
pressure. One other small provision I ought to men- 
tion because it is a convenience which, though obvious, 
is too often neglected, — each boy has plenty of elbow- 
room, and the tables are far enough apart not to inter- 
fere. A typical group — a master and seven bo}^s — 
occupies a table four feet by eight. The master sits at 
one end, and a boy at the other. This leaves three boys 



110 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

for each side, three boys for eight running feet. The 
width of the table, four feet, keeps each small boy at a 
judicious distance from his opposite neighbor. It is by 
such little devices as these that discomfort is changed 
into comfort, and social life made possible. I have always 
felt that good manners and rational intercourse were the 
easier to cultivate if the surroundings were commodious. 

After dinner the evenings pass almost too quickly. 
Sometimes there is a musical in the chapel ; always 
there is lively talk around the generous fireplace. Quiet 
games are going on at the big tables. Here and there a 
boy is reading, another is writing a letter. One group 
is watching a game of checkers or chess, quite outspoken 
in the matter of partisanship, while another group is 
discussing some point of interest with all the heat and 
eagerness of boyhood. Outside, individual camp-fires 
burn before some tent or cabin, a marshmallow roast is 
in progress, or a ghost-story is calling out delicious shiv- 
ers in tiny backs. By eight, the little boys are in bed ; 
by nine, most of the big boys. The camp sleeps soundly. 
One may make the rounds at any time during the night 
without meeting a soul or hearing other sound than the 
plaintive call of the whip-poor-will, the distant crying of 
a fox, and, on all sides, the regular breathing of healthy, 
sleeping boys. 

This simple daily programme represents the experi- 
ence of seventeen summers. It will be noticed that it is 
less radical than the California programme, especially 
in the disposition of the meals. The camp season is so 
short — only nine weeks — that it has not been thought 
wise to depart too widely from the home practice, or 
indeed, from the general hours of the neighboring coun- 
try life. This programme is not offered as anything re- 



THE YEARS OF GRACE 111 

markable, certainly not as a finality, — it is being mod- 
ified each year. Its one claim to attention is the same 
claim as that of the California programme, — its results. 
In seventeen years there has been no illness of moment, 
no serious accident, no death, no insubordination. Of 
the several hundred boys who have been in residence, 
there have been a few cases only which failed of benefit 
— two or three chronic ailments which would not re- 
spond to the simple, open-air treatment, two or three 
defectives who needed the skill of professed alienists, 
and a small group of boys who could not bring them- 
selves into sympathy with so simple and unexciting a 
life. But the great majority of the boys, certainly well 
over ninety per cent, responded wonderfully. Many of 
them were made over physically ; many of them became 
for the first time in their lives really robust ; most of them 
gained some new insight into the beauty and desirable- 
ness of a social, well-ordered life. The simplicity of the 
camp experience is so radical and complete, the associa- 
tion with the masters is so intimate and unbroken, that 
the two months of such a life really exert a more pro- 
found influence upon a growing boy than the eight or 
nine months of an average day school. 

I have reported these two experiments in so much 
detail because as actual experience they have a value 
much in excess of greater enterprises which are still 
untried. They have, as William James would say, a 
much larger cash value. The social significance of the 
experiments is of course limited to their adaptability. 
Not every parent and teacher can pitch his tent on the 
uplands of Southern California, or the hilltops of New 
Hampshire ; can give his boy a horse to ride, a lake to 
swim in, or even broad acres to roam over. But many 



112 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

could bring the equivalent of these things to their chil- 
dren, if only they had the idea, if only they were per- 
suaded of the graciousness and beauty of such a simple, 
open-air life. The obstacles in many cases are mental 
rather than physical, a failure to image the integrity of 
a child's life and to apprehend its simple needs. While 
the rank and file of parents and teachers must content 
themselves with the environment immediately at hand, 
and do the best they can with it, the essential element 
in these experiments can, fortunately, be realized almost 
anywhere, — the rigorous cleanness of atmosphere, of 
person, of drinking-water, of food, of clothing, of habi- 
tation ; the invigorating cold bath, the simple diet and 
costume, the adequate exercise, and the purifying sun- 
shine. Anywhere the daily bread may be made a sacra- 
ment by a moment of devout silence ; anywhere the 
evening meal may be transformed into a simple festival ; 
anywhere the combined magic of love and common sense 
may create a garden of health and happiness. 

The things that I am here so eagerly commending 
either cost nothing, or they cost less than the things 
they supplant. Outdoors is cheaper than indoors. The 
Swedish drill requires no apparatus ; it may be given in 
the back yard of a city house, or even in a city room 
with the windows all open. Cold water is more available 
than hot. Simple food and clothing cost less than elab- 
orate food and clothing. It is not that these essentially 
healthful things are difficult of attainment, — the diffi- 
culty is in our not sufficiently wanting them. 

I have called these childish years the years of grace. 
In a well-ordered life all years are gracious and fruit- 
ful, but these first fourteen years are perhaps the most 
important of all. The gods have laid a heavy charge 



THE YEARS OF GRACE 



113 



upon us, for the early years are also the most helpless 
years of all. The child is entirely dependent upon his 
elders. He is plastic, impressionable, receptive. We 
elders hold his destiny in our hand. The health which 
we give or withhold ; the skill which we impart or omit ; 
the impressions which we permit or deny ; the things 
which we do or fail to do, all give color to the subse- 
quent life and have about them the tragic significance 
of Destiny herself. Evolution proceeds by almost im- 
perceptible steps. The world grows human very, very 
slowly. As individuals we can accomplish little in the 
rebuilding of ourselves, — when the spirit awakens to 
the need, the years of grace have already flown. But in 
the children, in the new generation forever oncoming, 
we have the opportunity to incarnate our dearly won 
ideals, and exercise the high prerogative of creation. 
The radiant goal is not for us, but we may make it in- 
creasingly for them. 



TABLE OF HEIGHTS AND WEIGHTS 

Note : A child may, of course, vary from the approximate averages here given, 
but any marked variation would better be looked into, and especially any dispro- 
portion between height and weight. More detailed information will be found in 
Hastings's Manual, or in the publications of the United States Bureau of Education. 



Age 

(years) 


Boys 


GlKLS 


Height 


Weight 


Height 


Weight 


5 


3 ft. 6 in. 


39 lbs. 


3 ft. 5 in. 


38 lbs. 


6 


3 8 


43 


3 7 


41 


7 


3 10 


47 


3 9 


46 


8 


4 


51 


3 11 


49 


9 


4 2 


55 


4 2 


55 


10 


4 4 


61 


4 4 


60 


11 


4 5 


65 


4 5 


64 


12 


4 7 


72 


4 8 


73 


13 


4 9 


78 


4 10 


S3 


14 


4 11 


87 


5 ■ 


94 


15 


5 2 


103 


5 2 


103 


16 


5 U 


116 


5 2 


111 


17 


5 1 


125 


5 3 


111 


18 


5 8 


130 


5 3 


112 



VII 

SPIRIT 

EDUCATORS and psychologists are beginning to rec- 
ognize the immense importance of the early years of 
childhood. These years are, indeed, fraught with tragic 
significance. The happenings during the first fourteen 
years of life have such power for good or evil in all the 
subsequent years that they almost offer scientific ground 
for a belief in predestination. Many impressions re- 
ceived during even the first four years are quite uncon- 
sciously carried over, and become determining factors 
in later life. Many abnormalities may be traced to 
these latent impressions. The cure depends upon dis- 
covering such obsessions and bringing them over the 
threshold of consciousness. In the majority of cases, 
these residuary impressions are wholly trivial and 
illogical. Their power depends solely upon the fact 
that they work unknown to the sufferer, an enemy at 
once hidden and unrecognized. They cannot survive 
the light of day. As soon as the patient recognizes 
them, he recognizes at once their triviality and illogic, 
and puts them away from him spontaneously and with- 
out effort, — their power is gone. The diagnosis and 
the cure coincide. 

But the harm of the intervening years remains, the 
stubbornness, the unwisdom, the abnormality. And it 
has taken great devotion and skill on the part of the 
psychological practitioner to discover the obstacle. The 
patient cannot offer any help, for the impressions 



SPIRIT 115 

themselves are wholly unconscious. They can be iden- 
tified only by some outer ally. Freud and other inves- 
tigators have used the association test and dream 
analysis. With extraordinary skill and patience they 
have pried into the secrets of the inner, subconscious 
life, in order to rob these secrets of their power for 
harm. 

I am the more ready to accept the results of psycho- 
analysis because they harmonize with much in my own 
more limited experience. I often detect in myself con- 
duct which is neither logical nor consistent, conduct in 
fact which a subtle self quite disapproves of. But the 
apparent motive is so justifiable that, in spite of the 
inner confusion and hesitancy, I am forced to go on to 
the end of the chapter. Often the mystery and dis- 
satisfaction remain. But in many cases I have been 
able to find out the cause of the trouble. It is very 
simple, — it is that the apparent motive is not the real 
motive. When the real motive is clearly apprehended, 
the whole matter is easily cleared up. To be fore- 
warned is to be forearmed. Now, when I am conscious 
of dissatisfaction and hesitation, I hold up the event, 
and run back as quickly as possible over the causal 
chain to the other end of conduct, — the underlying 
motive. I am not always able to discover the intruder, 
but the more stubborn the hesitation, the more certain 
am I to find that a pseudo-motive is cloaking a real 
motive; and that the real motive, as soon as it is 
brought into the light, is one whose validity I do not 
for one moment accept. In some cases it is possible to 
trace the hidden impulse back to some event in child- 
hood or early youth, to some impression stamped much 
too deeply upon the unreflective sub-conscious self. In 



116 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

my own particular case, the difficulty is prone to be 
some inhibition, quite proper when applied to the case 
in hand, but actually disabling and misleading when 
spread by a childish conscience over too large a sweep 
of territory. The increasing freedom of later years is 
largely due, I think, to just this mastery over hidden 
and hitherto unrecognized inner obstacles, — the stub- 
bornness and egotism of an inexperienced and undisci- 
plined soul. 

This personal experience is, I think, quite common 
and typical. Many men and women have, when ques- 
tioned, reported something very similar. It is even 
possible to make the subconscious self disclose its own 
secrets. If one has a strong will, and is sensitive to the 
inner confusion of divided motives, one may by some 
sharp command force this agent of past time over the 
threshold of consciousness into the destroying logic of 
the present. In frequent cases, a peremptory order, such 
as " Face it ! " brings to light the cause of one's inner 
confusion, and in doing so, removes it. I would urge 
upon all parents and teachers some such rigid self- 
analysis whenever they discern the oncoming of a 
spiritual fog. Many of the difficulties of daily life, per- 
haps all of the so-called " problems," are the direct 
result of opaque motives. 

In dealing with children, the only key to a trouble- 
some situation is often this psychological key. It may 
sound a little mystical, but it is nevertheless a reality 
of experience that in attempting to meet the difficulty 
one must be willing for the moment to put one's self 
completely aside, almost to cease to be, so as to identify 
the self utterly with what is happening or has already 
happened. One must enfold the little troubled soul 



SPIRIT 117 

with one's own calm, unaccusing spirit. Then only is 
one master and able to serve. 

If I return often to that penetrating voice from the 
Far East, to that ancient Buddhist prayer which Sister 
Nivedita sent me just a few weeks before her death, I 
do it not only because of its haunting, iterative beauty, 
but still more because it seems to me to be the voice of 
a universal spiritual experience. The fundamental, 
essential work of education is with the spirit. It must 
safeguard the child spirit from false impressions, un- 
sound conclusions, unwarranted commands and inhibi- 
tions. It must remove obstacles and enemies and 
sorrows. The proper work of education is not to prune 
and thwart and bend and force. It is rather to keep 
hands off as well as harm off. ) It is to feed and nourish 
and cheer, so that the child spirit shall move forward 
freely into the novel creations of its own appointed 
path. 

We elders have been doing great violence to chil- 
dren, just as the established world has been doing great 
violence to us. We have been bruising the childish 
spirit, cramping it, deforming it. We have been asking 
it to conform to old models, when the new wine of life 
prompts to new adventures. 

As a result of my own educational work, and my 
study of child-life generally, I have come to believe 
more firmly than ever that we ought not, primarily, 
to concern ourselves with the intellectual development 
of children : but that we ought, in the most complete 
and thoroughgoing manner, to concern ourselves with 
spirit and body, and to accept the inevitable intellectual 
development, which accompanies the development of 
spirit and body, as a welcome and perfectly natural 



118 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

by-product. To do this is, I believe, to turn from effect 
back to cause, and so, in the end, to reap an immeas- 
urably larger harvest. It is, in reality, to become scien- 
tific. Spirit and body are the known sources of a rich 
intellectual life. Spirit is the motive power, the inspirer, 
the immortal, indwelling god. Body is the tool of 
spirit, the trained purveyor of those multitudinous 
and properly quantitative sensations out of which the 
intellect must build its rational superstructure. I dwell 
at so much length upon this point because it has for me 
all the importance of a discovery. 

It is a commonplace of observation that great men 
have good mothers. This is due, in part, to heredity, — 
sons are prone to resemble the mother. But it is also 
due, in still larger measure, to the spiritual and bodily 
training which a wise mother instinctively gives to her 
children. She is the shrewdest psychologist of us all. 
She shields and protects the little one from hobgoblin 
and enemy ; she helps the child spirit unfold and ex- 
pand ; she cares for the little body tenderly and effec- 
tively. It is the mother who creates an atmosphere of 
love and magnificent trust. For the moment, she oblit- 
erates herself, entering into the soul of her child, ban- 
ishing disorder and confusion, and making impossible 
forever the sentiments of fear and shame and doubt. 
And when such a mother sends her man-child out into 
the world, he cannot fail, — he is bound to win, because 
in his own spirit there are none of the hidden seeds of 
discord and failure. 

The educational method to which those of us who 
reverently care for children are more and more turning, 
is the method involved in our Buddhist prayer, in Ger- 
man and Swiss reforms, in the teaching of Freud and 



SPIRIT 119 

Montessori, in the heart of our so-called new education. 
It is summed up in the one word, — to unfold. 

We cannot get more out of children than there is in 
them, but we can easily get less. 

The more conscientious we elders are in following 
out the old methods of education, the more indefatigable 
and devoted, the greater amount of harm we are capable 
of doing. We prune and twine and thwart and force, 
and when all is done and said, we are visibly disheart- 
ened at the lean harvest. It seems to me that the real 
work of the teacher is largely negative. It is to remove 
the obstacles and hobgoblins and fear and disorder in a 
child's spirit, and then, in this atmosphere of sunshine 
and confidence, to allow him freely to find out things 
for himself, to discover the outer world and the inner 
texture of relationships, to have the joy and the assured 
rewards of original research. As Madame Montessori 
puts it, the teacher cannot begin his work by educating 
a child, for the simple reason that he has no clue to the 
operation and cannot proceed in any scientific manner. 
He must begin by observing the child, and then, when 
he knows his material, he can, with some hope of suc- 
cess, go to work. 

There is quite as much occasion for temperance and 
timeliness in teaching as there is in eating or drinking, 
or any of the other arts or necessities of life. Knowledge 
for which a child has no immediate use has small chance 
of appropriation or survival. Knowledge for which he 
is not yet ready is really just so much rubbish, and 
much more likely to be crooked than straight. To know 
a lot of things which are n't so is a very great intellectual 
and spiritual misfortune. We parents and teachers may 
not fashion a human soul. The attempt to do so has 



120 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

given the world such a crowd of dull and uninteresting 
persons, and such a crowd of misinformed persons. All 
we can properly do is to gain freedom for the arriving 
soul, and so help it to fashion itself. We must be ready 
to answer inquiries ; not prematurely, before they are 
put ; not afterwards, when the hour has gone by ; but 
at the moment, when inquiry is red-hot, and our answer, 
the truest we can possibly formulate, fits into that struc- 
ture of the world which the child is eagerly building. 
Then only is our precious knowledge sure of a vital and 
enduring place. 

Good advice is valueless unless it not only fits a need, 
but as well a need that is felt. It is related that Franklin 
and a young friend were once looking at the moon, when 
the young friend, by way of making conversation, re- 
marked, "Did you know, Mr. Franklin, that things not 
used on the earth go to the moon? " Quick as a flash 
came Franklin's retort, " What a lot of good advice 
there must be up there ! " And yet it is significant, al- 
most pathetic, the eagerness with which a child wel- 
comes both information and advice if they are not thrust 
upon it, but are only furnished on demand. When a 
boy is doing something, he wants to know the best and 
quickest way of doing it, and that is the time to teach him. 
His interest is engaged, and his mind is fertile ground. 
One may be sure that the harvest will be an hundred 
fold. It requires more patience and more art for us to 
accommodate ourselves to the children than for us to 
ask, as we commonly do, that they shall accommodate 
themselves to us ; but it is really the only sound way. 

Gardeners and stock-breeders accommodate them- 
selves to the plant and animal life which they are seek- 
ing to perfect ; I see no reason why human educators 



SPIRIT 121 

should not exercise an equal finesse in dealing with 
children. We are not, like God in Eden, to fashion a 
man out of the clay of the ground, and breathe into him 
our own spirit and make him after our own likeness. 
The man is already there in embryo, and it is our high 
office to clear away both spiritual and physical obstruc- 
tions and limitations, and to help our man-child develop 
into something more admirable than any of us have 
been able to foresee. 

These first fourteen years of life are literally years of 
grace. Both spirit and body are plastic and impression- 
able, and more can be done at this time than at any 
other period of life. The days are far too precious to 
be wasted over the dull tasks of the ordinary school- 
room or in poring over textbooks whose value at best is 
essentially second-hand. All the proper and practical 
work of this period can be summed up under these two 
heads, Spirit and Body, and the task can be made defin- 
ite and tangible by formulating in exact terms those 
attainable qualities of both spirit and body which, after 
sober and painstaking reflection, we believe that a lad 
of fourteen ought to possess. This will be a highly prac- 
tical way of getting at the matter. Since education is at 
all stages a process for accomplishing certain ends, we 
shall be the more efficient the more clearly we see these 
ends and the more literally we adapt our methods to 
their realization. 

Assuming that spirit is the essential cause, the gen- 
uine motive power of life, we may well begin by asking 
what spiritual qualities a boy of fourteen ought prefer- 
ably to possess. By keeping our endeavors in flexible, 
general terms, we may conserve the race gains and still 
leave ample opportunity for individual initiative and 



122 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

novelty. We may present many spiritual goals, but at 
the end of every eagerness we must add that we have 
not told the whole story and cannot tell it, since the 
world is ever fluid, and each generation must seek a new 
interpretation and must add its own peculiar contribu- 
tion. In Eastern symbolism, the dragon is the emblem 
of change, and therefore of life itself. In the higher 
mathematics, the significant factors are variables. In 
the teaching of Christ, greater works than his own were 
promised to the disciples who came after. We elders, 
attempting to guide the fluid, onflowing forces of life, 
may never with propriety suggest stationary goals. 
Okakura thus sums up the teachings of the Chinese 
philosopher, Oyomei, who lived in the early sixteenth 
century, but who is still a vital force in Japan : " With 
him all knowledge was useless unless expressed in ac- 
tion. To know was to be. Virtue was real in so far only 
as it was manifested in deeds. The whole universe was 
incessantly surging on to higher spheres of development, 
calling upon all to join in its glorious advance." A 
healthy boy is ready to take part in such a spiritual 
pageant, and the more eagerly as he comprehends that 
the total result depends in tiny measure upon himself. 
In concerning ourselves with his spirit, as with the mo- 
tive power of his life, we concern ourselves with his 
religion. 

I find it helpful in attempting such a formulation of 
desirable spiritual qualities to consider a boy first as an 
individual, and then as a social unit. It is not for one 
moment that his life is divided into such compartments, 
but only that the division clarifies our own thought and 
gives some assurance of completeness. I should say, 
then, that a boy of fourteen ought to possess Imagina- 



SPIRIT 123 

tion, Initiative, Sincerity, Truthfulness, Concentration, 
Thoroughness, Courage, Reverence, a high Sense of 
Honor, Habitual Serenity, and above all, a complete 
Lack of Self-Consciousness. It would be easy to extend 
the list or to curtail it, but either act would, I think, be 
a change for the worse. 

As a social unit, it seems to me that a lad of four- 
teen ought to possess AVarm Affection, Good Manners, 
Helpfulness, Unselfishness, and a keen Sense of Justice. 

I submit these lists of spiritual qualities, not as the 
best possible lists, certainly not as a finality, but sim- 
ply as the best lists that I have been able after consider- 
able thought to formulate. Each parent and teacher may 
want to modify the lists, so as to make them conform 
more closely to his own attitude towards life, that is to 
say, to his own personal conception of religion. The ma- 
jor point is that the proposed spiritual goal shall be 
definite and specific, but shall be handled in such a fluid 
way that it shall always include the possibility of growth. 

It may well be contended that some such goal is even 
now worked for by every earnest parent and teacher. 
To a certain extent this is happily true, but the goal is 
commonly worked for as a by-product, and not as the 
major end of education. AVe hope that our boy will have 
some such spiritual qualities, but we mean that he shall 
know how to read and write and figure. My whole point 
is that these spiritual qualities in a boy are infinitely 
more important to his present charm and future achieve- 
ment than any amount of academic training, than the 
most complete knowledge of reading, writing, arithmetic, 
history, geography, grammar, spelling, classics, and 
natural science. For charm and achievement are of the 
Spirit. It is very clear, then, that we ought to make 



124 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

these spiritual qualities the major end of all our en- 
deavor during those wonderful years of grace ; and that 
we ought to allow the intellectual development, up to 
fourteen years at least, to be a by-product, valuable and 
welcome certainly, but not primarily sought after. In 
the end we should get much the larger harvest of intel- 
lectual power, and much the larger man. 

When we erect a factory near some upland stream, 
we do not first equip it with delicate and multitudinous 
machinery, and then, quite incidentally, inquire into the 
amount of available water-power. As practical persons 
we first gauge our stream, and, by suitable engineering 
devices of storage reservoir and higher level, increase 
our motive power to the utmost ; then we design and 
build our factory. A similar course in educational mat- 
ters would seem to be only rudimentary common sense. 
It is the motive power of life, the human spirit, that we 
want first to gauge and then to heighten. 

The practical method is once more the method of 
bringing about in our own souls those changes which we 
desire to set up in the souls of our children. As a 
parent or a teacher, I must ask whether I myself have 
imagination, reverence, initiative, serenity, and all the 
other individual qualities which I desire in my little 
people ; whether I have genuine affection, manners, jus- 
tice, and those other social qualities which I wish them 
to have. If I personally do not possess these qualities, 
I cannot readily communicate them. 

It is a great thing to be reverent, to feel the essential 
sacredness of all life, in myself, in others, in animals and 
plants, in star and planet, in the gods, in the All-Father ; 
to destroy nothing wantonly; to undervalue nothing; to 
cherish all things for the precious fire of being that is 



SPIRIT 125 

their inner heart. To be reverent is to avoid all sacri- 
lege, all vulgarity, all caricature, all disfigurement. It 
.is to be something so essentially fine that in attaining 
/ reverence we might almost disregard any other quality. 
In reverence, we stand at the very heart of things. The 
reverent man is full of dignity and self-respect; he must 
be just, and seeing the excellence and beauty of the 
world, he cannot fail to admire and love. The great eth- 
ical teachers of the race have been reverent men. We 
have in this one supreme quality an epitome of the vir- 
tues of the spirit. It is akin to the Greek idea of Es- 
thetics, that exquisite constraint which leads a man to 
hate all that is unsuitable and sordid and exaggerated, 
and to love all that is excellent and temperate and beau- 
tiful. It is difficult, in any satisfactory way, to define 
reverence. It is so essentially a quality of the spirit that 
we can tell of it only meagerly in terms of the intellect. 
But we all know something of its quality, and as we 
practice reverence, we know increasingly. When we see 
a reverent man or woman, we know him as something 
worshipful, and in his presence we can only be our 
better self. I have known several such men and women, 
and their memory is a constant inspiration. A great 
man is always reverent ; children begin by being reverent. 
They lose this lovely quality as life becomes vulgarized, 
and they gain by imitation that deplorable thing, a cheap 
view of life. We cannot wholly shield the children from 
this ugly vulgarization, for it is on all sides of us, in 
business, in politics, in sectarian religion, in social life, 
even in our so-called education and art. But it is we 
who produce the atmosphere of the earlier years and 
control the most abiding impressions. If we have cast 
out of our own daily lives all vulgarity, all cheap hu- 



126 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

mor, all impiety, all caricature, all nasty insinuations, 
all evil gossip and uneharity, we are in a position to 
keep our children reverent, and to make it impossible 
for them in after life to be wholly vulgar. Personally, 
then, I should name Reverence as the most important 
quality of the spirit which we parents and teachers can 
cultivate in ourselves, and can communicate to our 
children. 

To say of man or woman that they have no Imagi- 
nation is to convict them of many actual and potential 
sins. Such a defect means obtuseness in manners and 
morals, sterility in art and science, blundering in the 
general conduct of life. Children are often accused of 
having too much imagination, but in reality that is 
hardly possible. The imagination may run riot, and, 
growing by what it feeds upon, come dangerously near 
to untruthfulness, — the store of facts may have been 
too small. But the remedy is not to cripple or kill the 
imagination; it is rather to provide the needed equip- 
ment of facts and to train the imagination to work with- 
in the limits of truth and probability. The unimagina- 
tive man is exceedingly dull company. From the moment 
he opens his eyes in the morning until he closes them 
at night, he is prone to the sins of both omission and 
commission. No matter how good his intentions, he con- 
stantly offends. No matter how great his industry, he 
fails to attain. One can trace many immoralities, from 
slight breaches of manners to grave criminal offenses, 
to a simple lack of imagination. The offender failed to 
see, — he was, to all intents and purposes, blind. At its 
best, imagination is insight. As its absence is responsible 
for many of the brutalities of social life, so its presence 
is the direct source of most of our social amenities, of 



SPIRIT 127 

toleration, charit}^ consideration, — in a word, of all 
those social virtues which distinguish the child of light. 
" Tout comprendre, cest tout pardonner." 

It is not safe to assume that we parents and teachers 
are blessed with such a large store of imagination that we 
may at once pass on to the work of cultivating it in our 
children. On the contrary, our immense lack of equip- 
ment in this illuminating quality is only too evident 
when one glances at our schools, our industries, our 
churches, our government, at our own irrational lives. 
A lively imagination playing freely about these social 
institutions would long ago have quite transformed them. 
The fact people of the world have scant regard for the 
imaginative people, for it is imagination which pricks 
many a solemn bubble and upsets many a time-honored 
convention. Imagination is at the heart of all reforms, 
of all progress. It is the enemy of all absurdity and un- 
reason. To see the world as it is, and then to picture it 
as it ought to be and might be, — this is the high prov- 
ince of the imagination. Even in the exact sciences, it 
is the man of imagination who extends the boundaries of 
knowledge. In mathematics, astronomy, physics, chem- 
istry, even in biology, one must be a poet, and must see 
the things that are not, as well as the things that are. 
One must image novel results in order to win novel re- 
sults. I once asked a fellow-student at Zurich what was 
the matter with a certain hard-working Englishman who 
seemed to be getting nowhere. " Oh," said he, " he 's a 
fact man, you know," — and his answer did not leave 
me wondering. 

All the men and women who have done things have 
had imagination. So valuable a quality is well worth 
cultivating in ourselves and in our children. It can be in- 



128 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

creased by definite and practical methods. One excellent 
step in this direction is not to take things for granted, 
but in a friendly way to question all statements by con- 
trasting them with their opposites. Another is to read 
books of travel and adventure, fairy-tales of a sober sort, 
and the lives of inventors and pioneers. We are prone 
to forget that human achievement is a spiritual victory 
and depends upon invention. A prominent sociologist 
thus states the case : " Wealth, the transient, is mate- 
rial : achievement, the enduring, is immaterial. The 
products of achievement are not material things at all. 
They are not ends, but means. They are methods, ways, 
principles, devices, arts, systems, institutions. In a word, 
they are inventions." In the face of such testimony as 
this, it is odd that we should make education consist of 
repetition, and should grant such small part to initia- 
tive. Another step in the cultivation of imagination is 
to try to put one's self in another's place, and so dis- 
cover why he did as he did. In all social study, conduct 
is only intelligible when you establish a motive. With 
the help of imagination, the human drama becomes fluid, 
— you see how a catastrophe might have been averted, 
a situation saved, a quarrel avoided. To follow conse- 
quences back to causes, and causes forward to probable 
consequences, to put after each statement of what is, the 
statement of what might have been, to hold the world 
fluid in the hand of your fancy, — all this is to give the 
imagination pleasurable and helpful exercise, to increase 
it through use. 

But to keep the imagination wholesome, to make it a 
useful quality of the spirit, and not a mere dissipator 
of energy, one must observe the sound limits within 
which the faculty may operate. When imagination slips 



SPIRIT 129 

her anchor in fact, or opposes herself to proved fact, 
we pass into a region of pure fantasy, and commonly 
return home empty-handed. There are many such idle 
excursions, and they have done much to discredit the 
legitimate and helpful use of the imagination. 

In most of our current education, instead of culti- 
vating so valuable a quality, we have stupidly done all 
that we can to suppress it. We have not sufficiently 
studied the actual boy before us to find out what he is 
up to, and what end he has in mind. On the contrary, 
we proclaim, with curious indifference, some end of our 
own devising, and, with what really amounts to spiritual 
brutality, we try to drive him towards it. We do this, 
we irresponsible parents and teachers, because we our- 
selves lack imagination, and do not see that we are 
blunting, instead of sharpening, our human tool. Yet we 
define education in terms of imagination when we say 
that education is the unfolding and perfecting of the 
human spirit ; or, that education is a setting-up in the 
heart of the child of a moral and aesthetic revelation of 
the universe ; for the human spirit which we are trying 
to establish is not a fact, but a gracious possibility of 
the future, and the revelation which we are seeking to 
bring about does not deal with facts, but with that sub- 
tler and more imaginative thing, the significance of 
facts. 

In nothing do we need more desperately to reverse 
our tactics, for without imagination, education itself is 
quite impossible. When, in the name of education, we 
stifle imagination, we cripple at the same time another 
spiritual quality which we ought with immense assiduity 
to cultivate, and that is Initiative. One recalls, with a 
heartache, the story of that conscientious Boston mother 



130 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

who said to her little boy, " Now, Jack, to-morrow 's 
your birthday, and I want you to have a very good time. 
Think a moment, and tell mother what you would most 
like to do." But Jack knew without thinking, for he 
answered promptly, " Thank you, mother. I should most 
like just to be let alone." 

We do not invariably cultivate initiative by letting 
children alone, but in nine cases out of ten, it is a highly 
effective method. In our honest desire for their better- 
ment, the temptation is always to jump in and to do for 
them, when we would much better keep hands off, and 
allow them, under favorable conditions, to do for them- 
selves. They may do something which, from an objective 
point of view, is much less excellent than our own well- 
considered plan. But education is not an objective 
process. It is subjective, and was wrapped up in the 
funny blundering little enterprise of the child, rather 
than in our own intrusive one. I have known boys to at- 
tend schools reported to be good, from nine o'clock in 
the morning until two in the afternoon, and then, after a 
late luncheon, to have a tutor come for a couple of hours 
to help them with their lessons. Those of us who live 
in careful New England are familiar with the sight of 
a college man, of a Saturday morning, taking a group 
of youngsters into the country, to teach them, ye gods, 
to play ! Personally I always decline to name a man for 
either misdemeanor, much as he may be needing the 
money, for I know how enfeebling it is for a boy to be 
led around by the nose in either work or play. It is our 
province, we elders, to suggest activities, if need be, and 
to supply such reasonable equipment as the boy cannot 
put together for himself. It is our privilege to help, to 
sympathize, even in a quiet way, to oversee ; but never, 



SPIRIT 131 

as we value education, may we do anything that will 
make the boy less sjwntaneous, less self-reliant, less ini- 
tiative. 

We all have to deal with helpless youngsters, made 
so by over-active parents and unwise teachers, and often 
the only cure is to administer wholesome neglect, to al- 
low the youngsters to be thoroughly bored, for several 
weeks if need be, until it dawns upon them that, if 
they are to have a good time, they must themselves 
be up and doing, and must get into the game on their 
own account. I have had such little fellows at my camp. 
They have been visibly amazed to find that they did 
not occupy the center of the stage ; that their little ills 
were not taken seriously ; that life held larger matters 
than their own purely personal concerns. Sometimes 
they have been indignant, sometimes rebellious, often 
bored and ready to go home at the first opportunity ; 
but in the end, if they have good stuff in them, they 
come around, pick up the reins of life, and learn to be 
good campers and good comrades. 

These helpless boys come mostly from private day 
schools which are the abode of much unwisdom ; and 
from wealthy or well-to-do homes which are the abode of 
self-indulgence and soft living. A day school depends 
for its support upon a very local clientele, and unless 
it has greater backbone than common, represents the 
educational and social prejudices of its patrons, rather 
than the wisdom of its headmaster. In homes where the 
parents themselves are given to soft living, it is useless 
to expect sturdiness in the children. 

In reality there is little hope for a boy without ini- 
tiative, or a girl either, for that matter ; and it is our 
plain business to work for it with a passion which we 



132 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

have never brought to the subjunctive mood or the rule 
of three. 

In Sincerity and Truthfulness, we have, perhaps, the 
most important virtues of the spirit, and yet, as a mat- 
ter of educational effort, I have not placed them first. 
They seem primal virtues, to have to do with the very 
fiber of the spirit. But the more I study and value 
them, and the more I work for them, the more persist- 
ently do they present themselves to me as the result of 
reverence and insight. A boy will, in the main, be sin- 
cere and truthful, without express mention of the words 
themselves, if the conditions of his life are sound. The 
main obstacle is that we, his parents and teachers, are 
for the most part neither sincere nor truthful. We lie 
about the most important things of life and plume our- 
selves upon our honesty iu trifles. We lie about our 
religion, professing beliefs which we do not hold ; we 
lie about our business and industrial life ; we lie about 
marriage and friendship ; we lie about education and 
art ; we lie outrageously about politics. We fib our way 
through social life. And in the end, we pay the tragic, 
unescapable penalty of all lying, — we lie unwittingly 
to ourselves. 

Bismarck was once asked whether he intended to 
follow a certain diplomatic line. He replied, without 
hesitation, " No ; but had I intended to follow it, my 
answer would have been the same." It is not manners 
to ask certain questions, but the slight offense hardly 
justifies the graver one. 

Children are very quick to detect insincerity and 
untruthfulness, and they are also very imitative. We 
elders must make our own thought and speech and 
deed wholly honest before we venture to present our 



SPIRIT 133 

souls before the questioning, clairvoyant eyes of child- 
hood. When Jack takes a piece of candy and says that 
he did n't, it is reprehensible, of course, but not nearly 
so reprehensible as many of the things which his father 
and mother are doing the whole twenty-four hours. 

The real objection of the grown-up world to all plain 
speaking is due to a petty view of human nature. We 
assume that our auditor only wants to hear so much 
about himself as is flattering. We pay him a poor com- 
pliment. It would be a far greater compliment to as- 
sume that he wants only the plain, unvarnished truth, 
and to present it to him in a serene, natural-history 
spirit without any thought of either flattery or condem- 
nation. The truth ought to be of interest to no one quite 
so keenly as to the man it concerns. To think or to act 
otherwise is to esteem him very meanly. There are, of 
course, extraordinary circumstances under which lying 
is quite justifiable. I should myself lie without com- 
punction to an invading army, to a criminal, or to a 
person either insane or grievously ill, and believe that 
in doing so, I was doing God's service. But we seldom 
meet such an emergency. The majority of persons that 
we come in contact with are neither invaders, nor crim- 
inals, nor defectives. They are normal, aspiring, truth- 
loving persons just like ourselves. If we could bring 
ourselves to think more highly of them, we would tell 
them the truth. 

But even if we assume that we elders have so far 
become truthful ourselves that we can stand unabashed 
before the round, open eyes of childhood, there still 
remain a number of things which we must do, and must 
not do, if we wish a similar honesty in the little people. 
For one thing, we must never put a child on the defen- 



134 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

sive. This is to place a premium on lying. In all our 
relations with children, we must play fair, — we must 
remember that size and strength and experience and 
authority are all on our side, and that to use this 
advantage unduly is to invite on the children's part 
the one possible defense, untruthfulness. A child lies 
generally because he is afraid. He may be tempera- 
mentally a coward, or he may simply for the moment 
be afraid of us, afraid of our ridicule, or scorn, or pun- 
ishing power. The remedy for lying is not to be too 
visibly shocked by it, but rather, in a fine and gentle 
spirit, to help the little fellow overcome his fear. To 
ask in anger if he has done so and so, or why he has 
done it, is to inspire fear and invite a lie. The better 
way is to hold his hand in yours, to take him on your 
lap, perhaps, to make him feel your love, your calm, 
your immense, impersonal sense of justice. In that fine 
air of confidence it is possible to speak together quietly 
and truthfully. 

Children do not commit large offenses. Their great- 
est faults, if rightly handled, are mere peccadilloes, 
and the punishment ought logically to fit the crime. For 
most sensitive children, effective punishment has al- 
ready been administered when the wrongdoing has been 
quietly but inexorably analyzed and made to appear in 
its true light. When children cease to be frank, and 
begin to conceal and deceive and lie, it nearly always 
means that parents and teachers have been both unwise 
and unkind, and have forced the children into a false 
position. If the children had had greater courage, they 
would, perhaps, have braved it out and stood the con- 
sequences. But why assume courage? It is a highly 
desirable quality of the spirit, but one that may be less 



SPIRIT 135 

reasonably assumed than many of those other qualities 
for whose cultivation we have been willing, with so much 
patience, to work. 

Each day in a child's early life is a voyage of dis- 
covery, and he is brought at any moment face to face 
with the unknown. His first and strongest instinct is 
that of self-preservation ; and it is easy to see in the 
unknown something fearsome and threatening. Fur- 
thermore, such terrors are most real to the best type of 
child, to the most alert and most imaginative. Fear is 
so perfectly natural that it is, I think, more scientific 
to assume fear than to assume courage. On this as- 
sumption it is manifestly fatuous to heighten fear and 
then to expect truthfulness. Fear and lying go together ; 
courage and truthfulness. One is reminded of the 
small boy's definition of a lie, — an abomination unto 
the Lord, and a very present help in time of trouble. 

It is seldom wise to try to laugh a child out of his 
fear. What really happens is that at best he merely 
smothers the fear, to all appearances, and goes on quak- 
ing in secret. A sensitive child suffers an altogether 
unwarranted nervous strain, and, as Freud has shown, 
may store up harmful impressions to dog the footsteps 
of his later life. The only sensible thing is to remove 
fear, carefully and lovingly, by showing it to be in most 
cases quite groundless, and by teaching a boy, as early 
as may be, to meet the unavoidable disasters of life, 
the veritable catastrophies, with a manly courage that 
will rob them of their sting. As Emerson says, " Fear 
nothing but fear." It seems to me, then, a quite use- 
less beating of the air to try to instill courage into a 
boy without first removing the sources of fear. For 
fear is the primitive, positive thing, the natural shrink- 



136 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

ing of the inexperienced spirit in the presence of pos- 
sible harm ; and courage is the absence of fear. To 
teach a boy that in all the great universe there is no 
genuine occasion for fear, to show him that to a rever- 
ent, enlightened soul no essential harm can come, is to 
bestow the high gift of courage, and along with it, its 
bedfellow, truthfulness. We cannot too vividly realize 
that these flowers of the spirit, which are the real goal 
of education, have their necessary roots in an orderly, 
rational attitude towards life, that is to say, in religion ; 
and that, unless one is willing to go to the root of the 
whole matter, one cannot be a faithful parent or a true 
teacher. 

In Concentration and Thoroughness, we have another 
pair of those spiritual qualities which need not so much 
to be cultivated as conserved. In a healthy boy, both 
are present. There is something astonishingly thorough- 
going in all the boyish activities which spring from a 
genuine interest, and have well-developed foundations 
in a boy's own spirit. No scientist at his problem, or 
artist at his work, shows a greater concentration than 
an alert boy at some natural and proper task. In cer- 
tain lines of enterprise, boyish is almost synonymous 
with thorough. There is in boys of the right sort a 
splendid surplus energy which they pour unstintingly 
into those activities which genuinely engage the spirit. 
We elders may well envy their concentration and thor- 
oughness and sincerity. These robust, full-blooded, alert 
boys are the very flower of boyhood, but they are the 
very boys whom our current conventional education 
does its utmost to cripple and dwarf. Instead of utiliz- 
ing this splendid boyish energy, it tries to diminish it; 
instead of thanking God for such gospel measure of 



SPIRIT 137 

spirit, it busies itself with trying to tame and subdue 
it. This seems to me both unscientific and immoral. 
Our proper work is just the contrary ; it is to conserve 
this priceless energy, this magnificent spirit, and, if we 
can, to heighten them, for we are dealing with the mo- 
tive power of life. In a word, we must work with the 
boy, not against him. True education is unfolding, not 
imposing. 

A high Sense of Honor, like so many other good qual- 
ities, is really involved in reverence. It is a reverence 
for one's self, a sense of what is due to one's own stand- 
ard of personal excellence. At its best, it is so precious 
a quality that it deserves special emphasis in every 
scheme of education, and special effort for its attain- 
ment. But there is need for great skill. A man's sense 
of honor, or a boy's, may easily be perverted ; it may 
easily become a petty and detestable form of egotism. 
In the end, he may come to strut and attitudinize, to 
carry a chip on each shoulder, to make himself utterly 
ridiculous. It is our man of honor who works himself 
into a passion when there is no occasion for passion, 
who fights silly duels, and who, when his domestic affairs 
go wrong, ceases to be a gentleman, and becomes only 
an infuriated male. There are few fine qualities which 
have so many tinsel substitutes. In reality, honor is a 
sensitive thing, and one may not play with it. It must 
ring true, and every time. Perhaps it may sound odd, 
and even paradoxical, but the only way to cultivate a 
high sense of honor, a pure-gold reverence for one's 
self, is to pass beyond the self into that impersonal 
world of excellence where human passion and bombast 
and absurdity are quite impossible attributes. Talk to 
a boy about honor, help him in every possible way to 



138 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

deepen his own sense of honor, but, above all, see to it 
that he has hold of the genuine, universal thing, and is 
not merely strutting, trying to lift himself by his own 
boot-straps. 

There are many legitimate appeals to a boy's sense 
of honor, but they all involve this seeming paradox, 
that, while they are intensely personal appeals, they are 
always to something essentially impersonal, to some- 
thing bigger than the boy himself, in the end to some 
august principle of excellence in the remote and pas- 
sionless empyrean. A practical parent or teacher does 
not begin out in space, — he ends there. He appeals 
to the boy himself, to the inner image of his own 
honorable self, to the boy as member of an honorable 
family, as member of a school of good repute, as citi- 
zen of town and Commonwealth, as an American ; and 
only as the boy's own thought mounts, comes that 
final, immense, unescapable, impersonal appeal, to the 
boy as Man created in the image of God, and com- 
mitted, therefore, to the excellent and the universal. It 
is hard for man or boy to resist the compulsion of such 
an appeal. In yielding to it, he becomes a hero ; in en- 
tertaining it, he is potentially a hero. 

The good habit of Serenity is best cultivated in our 
boys by exhibiting it in ourselves. It reduces the useless 
friction of life and so heightens its efficiency. 

In the Lack of Self-consciousness, we have a vital ele- 
ment in the equipment of the spirit. I have placed it 
last in order to give it the greater emphasis. Self-con- 
sciousness is a fault of practically universal extent ; the 
absence of it is the first qualification of the larger life. 
The Indian sages teach that there are three stages of 
consciousness. In the first stage there is no recognition 



SPIRIT 139 

of a separate self. The knower and the knowledge are 
one, — subject and object coincide. I am the event, the 
thing that is happening, the fabric of the dream. Very- 
young children are supposed to be in this first stage of 
consciousness. It is identification through ignorance. In 
the second stage, the illusion of self has entered. The 
knower and the knowledge have flown apart, the subject 
and object have retreated to opposite poles. In this stage, 
the drama of the world moves on outside and apart from 
the self. There is a sharp distinction and separate inter- 
ests. The self looks on as spectator, taking part when it 
seems profitable to take part, and holding aloof when 
it seems better so. But participation is not always vol- 
untary, and it is this which makes the second stage of 
consciousness so unsatisfactory an abode. However ex- 
clusive, the self is constantly enmeshed in the world- 
drama, sometimes as a happy participant, but often and 
unwillingly as shrinking victim. It is the stage of self- 
consciousness through illusion, and is the portion of 
nearly all mankind — an arid desert wandering in which 
reside fear, cowardice, envy, malice, and all the evil 
brood of the isolated, tormented spirit. 

But there is a third stage of consciousness which our 
Indian friends call the Cosmic Consciousness. It is a re- 
turn through knowledge to the beatitudes of early child- 
hood, a rediscovery of the identification of knower and 
knowledge, a coming-together again of subject and ob- 
ject. Once more, I cease to be, for I am the event itself, 
the thing that is happening, the storm, the fire, the whirl- 
wind, the still small voice, the universe itself. So perish 
all selfishness and doubt, all fear and cowardice, all em- 
barrassment and evil thinking, — I lose myself, and gain 
the world. This third stage of consciousness, this cos- 



140 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

mic consciousness, is the theater of the great things, of 
the heroisms and achievements. It is the vestibule of 
heaven, the meeting-ground of men and gods. In at- 
tempting to make it articulate, one only succeeds, per- 
haps, in making it seem mystical and unreal ; but it is> 
in truth, a very substantial thing, a genuine experience 
which comes to all of us in the great moments of life. 
In the presence of superb beauty, under the spell of 
divine music, face to face with the heroic, carried away 
by love, patriotism, enthusiasm, wonder, the little self 
vanishes, and one is conscious only of the greater mar- 
vel of the whole ; one is merged in it, and becomes part 
of it. In this absence of self-consciousness is the secret 
of many charms, — the charm of childhood, of enthusi- 
astic youth, of unselfish womanhood, of faithful manhood, 
of inspiring old age. Then is life at its highest and best. 
It is then that happiness comes. When I ask much for 
myself, I am always poor, — when I ask nothing, I have 
the wealth, not of the Indies, but of the universe. 

And life is at its lowest and meanest when it is 
provocative of self-consciousness. We have here an all- 
sufficient test of morality. In self -consciousness alone is 
there the possibility of sin ; in the cosmic consciousness, 
our one approach to godhead. Formal education, and 
the culture that is offered ready-made, have a tendency 
to foster self-consciousness, and to that extent are evil. 
The petty jealousies of men of science, the belittling 
controversies over questions of priority, are evidences 
in point. It is only by starving self-consciousness in 
childhood that we can prepare the spirit for a truer cul- 
ture. And here again, the parent or teacher who has 
gained such a victory for himself will be the better 
qualified for the task. From the nature of the case, self- 



SPIRIT 141 

consciousness cannot be cured by sermonizing. The less 
said about it the better. But one can watch, and guard 
against it ; one can throw out the over-personal note in 
every boyish narrative ; one can make it felt that things 
worth telling must have an interest in themselves, and 
not depend merely upon the fact that they happened to 
the speaker. With fair skill an older person can grad- 
ually shift the emphasis until the little egoist becomes 
quite unconsciously a faithful reporter. 

I have heard women complain of this over-personal 
note in women, and I realize that our society does its 
utmost to produce it. This is especially true of the 
young girls in well-to-do and wealthy families. They 
are deprived of all wholesome work, petted, decked out 
in the finest, feted in every permissible way, flattered 
by men and women alike, indulged and catered to on 
all occasions, until it seems to me quite seriously as if 
an older generation, jealous of the natural charm of 
youth, had conspired to ruin that charm as rapidly and 
completely as possible. An over-conscious woman may 
be amusing for a very short time, but she is never really 
charming. Ten to one, her seeming adorer is laughing 
at her up his sleeve. 

This over-personal note is not limited to women. It 
is found only too well developed in men as well, from 
statesmen and literary lions down to day-laborers and 
commercial travelers. And in both men and women it 
is deplorable, for it is the source of nearly all the mean- 
ness and crime in the world. I have come to believe that 
salvation is in reality a very simple process, a passing- 
out from this over-personal life of the second stage 
of consciousness into the larger, universal life of the 
cosmic consciousness. To live on this plane is to become 



142 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

as a god, putting off all fear, all hatred, all jealousy, 
all pettiness, and entering into the life eternal. I have 
seen men and women being saved, just as I have seen 
them being lost, and I know how dramatically real the 
process is. These great impersonal souls are to me very 
worshipful. They demand nothing and therefore have 
everything. In their presence, one puts off all pettiness, 
as one puts off a soiled garment, and arrays one's self 
in all that is big and universal and eternal. 

It is more rational and efficient to save children from 
self-consciousness, or to nip it in the bud when it has 
already appeared, than to ignore it, or even to foster it, 
as we do in so much of our current education and so- 
cial practice, and then trust to the discipline of later life 
to root it out, perhaps, and save the soul alive. Abso- 
lutely the most vital and important thing in education 
is to make our children big in spirit by making them 
universal and unconscious of the self. From the mo- 
ment of birth, education should strive after this su- 
preme good, — both home and school should stand for 
the larger life. 

It is, perhaps, natural for an individualist to believe 
that the social virtues grow out of individual, personal 
victories, rather than the reverse. Certainly it seems to 
me that a boy who lacks self-consciousness, who has a 
high sense of honor, who is reverent and courageous, 
who is thorough, single-hearted, truthful, who has sin- 
cerity, initiative, imagination, will almost unavoidably 
display those social qualities which we have agreed are 
desirable. He will have the sources already existent in 
his own inner spirit. But here, again, determinate cul- 
ture is a distinct help. 



SPIRIT 143 

If a boy has Warm Affections, we can keep them un- 
impaired, and can heighten them. We can show him that 
love is truly the greatest thing in the world, greater 
than knowledge or wealth or fame, — greater even than 
athletics ; and we can, perhaps, keep him from the silly 
belief that it is unmanly to show emotion. Inhibition 
of all signs of emotion leads finally to the inhibition of 
emotion itself, — the springs run dry. There are few 
persons who are wholly lovable, but happily there are 
also few who are not partly so. The search for excel- 
lence and lovableness may be made a habit. A boy can 
be taught to seek the good points in his companions, 
and to help stifle the bad points by ignoring them, quite 
as readily as he can be taught the rules of grammar 
and arithmetic. And it is much more worth while. The 
bad points are often only bad because they are incon- 
venient to ourselves and wound our own egotism. Once 
get into the habit of looking for what is heroic and 
lovable, and once over the habit of making personal 
demands, and the world changes from a jungle to a 
garden. A boy is freckled and snub-nosed and under- 
sized, but, ye stars, how bright his eyes are ! He is 
not much at baseball, but, ye whales and little fishes, 
how he can swim ! His spelling is all to the bad, but, 
Michael Angelo, Raphael, Velasquez, and Whistler, 
how beautiful his drawings are! He doesn't care a 
brass farthing for me, but, Roland and Oliver, how 
stanch he is to the friends of his own choosing ! Now, 
this attitude of mind can be made just as real and nat- 
ural as the current belittling attitude, and it is vastly 
more wholesome and helpful. Furthermore, it can be 
cultivated. Little children are naturally affectionate ; 
their loyalty to father, mother, nurse, friend, is some- 



144 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

thing superb. If they cease to he affectionate and loyal, 
it is because they have been repulsed and deceived. 
Once more the fault lies at our own door. It takes skill 
to love a child successfully, just as it takes skill to ideal- 
ize any other relation in life. We need more tact, we 
parents and teachers, and, to be quite frank, more un- 
selfishness. The simple trouble is that we love children 
for our own pleasure, not for their good, — we pet them, 
indulge them when the mood is on, smother them with 
kisses, spoil them, making ourselves the real object of 
attention and the children the toys. We are gratified 
when the children respond, and forget that in reality 
we have bribed them. A boy does not want to be inter- 
rupted at his work or play, to be petted and made much 
of. But there comes a moment when work is over, and 
play is over, when darkness comes on apace, and our 
lad is tired, and bedtime approaches. This is the time 
for tenderness and confidences, — when he is ready, 
not when we are. To love children for our own pleas- 
ure, to pet them with more intensity, perhaps, but in 
much the same fashion that we pet kittens and puppies 
and other soft warm young animals, is no particular 
credit to us and may easily be a harm to them. The 
only love worth talking about is the love that prompts 
\ to service. We parents and teachers must be quite 
frank with ourselves, and distinguish quite sharply be- 
tween the love which is self-seeking and the love which 
is unselfish. We want, by example first, and by precept 
when it is timely, to encourage in our boys a warm af- 
fection for the world at large, an affection rich in giv- 
ing, not in asking. 

I do not think that children are naturally either man- 
nerly or rude. At their best, they display a quiet self- 



SPIRIT 145 

possession which is an excellent basis for all social 
training. If, in addition, they have a genuine considera- 
tion for other people, the quest of Good Manners is al- 
ready well advanced. Too often, manners are presented 
to children as somewhat arid conventionalities which 
might quite as well have been different, and, as such, 
all healthy children, and especially boys, are prone to 
shy at them. Good manners, for most people, are the 
result of culture, and, as we all know, it would better 
begin with our ancestors. But no wholesome boy is 
really averse to good manners. The task is simply to 
present them in a right light. Mere mandatory state- 
ments — "You must do this," "You mustn't do that" 
— are very apt to leave him cold, or even antagonistic. 
But when you show him good manners as the very best 
and most reasonable way of doing things, as the way 
which will be most considerate of others, and best satisfy 
his own sense of suitableness, he is sympathetic to the 
point of eagerness. The practical way is to get him in- 
terested in good manners, and then to impart them. An 
imaginative boy is quick to learn, and if both your ex- 
ample and your instruction are sound, he is quick to see 
the point. But good manners are much too valuable a 
possession to be left to chance suggestions and hints, or 
to any sort of hazard whatsoever. They must be taught 
systematically, persistently, thoroughly, for in the suc- 
cessful conduct of life they are vastly more important 
than many of the academic branches which we, with so 
much industry, pursue. Just as a matter of discipline, 
they quite excel mathematics. It is not difficult to be 
systematic, — one has only to run over the events of a 
typical day. The boy gets up and goes to bed, dresses 
and undresses, eats three meals a day, meets people, 



146 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

talks with them, is alone and in society, at home, at 
school, on the street, in public places, at work and at 
play. These and other typical acts of the day are to be 
examined and idealized. Unusual situations may be pre- 
sented, and the best conduct under the circumstances dis- 
cussed and illustrated. Above all, the boy must be shown 
that good manners are not a garment to be put on and off 
according to the society in which he finds himself, but 
are, on the contrary, a part of the very fiber of life ; 
that a well-bred man is quite as mannerly to himself, 
when he is alone, as on the grandest occasion in society. 

It is this perfect poise of the well-bred which embar- 
rasses and finally irritates the man of shifting standards. 
" Company manners " are seldom carried off with any 
degree of success, and never yet appeared other than 
artificial and tawdry. To be truly mannerly at any time, 
one must be mannerly at all times. This is a lesson par- 
ticularly needed in American homes, where mothers and 
fathers are often distressed at the rudeness of their 
children, but forget that they themselves are frequently 
off guard, in undress, as it were, spiritually. If one is 
at all sensitive in these very human matters, one can 
tell all too easily whether the children are merely on 
their good behavior, whether the host is really a gentle- 
man, whether the hostess has assumed her voice and 
carriage and manner for the occasion, or graciously pos- 
sesses them at all times. I know of few little things 
more annoying than to be with persons who are appar- 
ently playing up to a role, and who must, as it were, 
remember not to be rude. 

Where good manners are apprehended as mere con- 
ventions, they are at best uncertain, and slip off with 
discouraging ease. But where they are the outer mani- 



SPIRIT 147 

festations of an abiding inner grace, they may be counted 
upon as long as consciousness lasts. To be mannerly 
from an inner necessity is to be well-bred, and any child 
or man or woman who is less than that, may not by any 
courtesy be called educated. 

Under conditions at all favorable, a boy's native Sense 
of Justice is generally pretty sound. He may do cruel, 
unreasonable, unjust things, but it is commonly through 
ignorance, or through that cowardice which he shares 
with many a grown-up, the fear of being different from 
other people. But in nine cases out of ten, he really 
wants fair play. It is our opportunity to show him in 
what fair play consists ; to make clear to him his own 
right to do exactly as he pleases so long as he does not 
infringe upon others, and the right of all other boys and 
girls, men and women, to do exactly the same thing. 
Any boy can easily be made to see this, but as a rule 
it must be pointed out to him, for in his excessive con- 
ventionality he is prone to think that people who are 
different are necessarily wrong. It is wise to illustrate 
this fundamental principle of justice with a variety of 
concrete examples, especially by the case in hand, 
whether the boy is himself the offender or the one 
offended against. And it is particularly wise to illus- 
trate the full measure of justice in your own dealing 
with the boy. Boys are very concrete, and as we all 
know, much given to unconscious imitation. If they 
have learned to have confidence in their fathers and 
teachers, they have at once a very ready-to-hand and 
serviceable standard. " I wonder what father would 
say," or, " I wonder what Mr. A. would do under the 
circumstances," become handles for many a problem, 
and warders-off of many a casuistry. 



148 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

Justice is the first of the cardinal virtues, and in the 
dealings of man with man it is the quality of greatest 
practical importance ; but in dealing with children we 
must remember that the conception of justice is rather 
large and abstract for childish minds to grasp. It has 
taken the race several millenniums to evolve the idea, 
and even now our hold is very partial and insecure. In 
the beginning, I think, the conception of justice must 
come as the flower of the more concrete and easily im- 
aged virtues, of imagination and reverence, and a high 
sense of honor, and love and mannerliness. The good 
life, like the moral law, is all of a piece. He who is pos- 
sessed of one fundamental virtue is potentially possessed 
of all. But as the boy grows older, he can be led to 
meet each issue in matters of conduct with this one 
penetrating test, — Is it just ? If he has offended, he 
can be brought to see and acknowledge his fault much 
sooner if, instead of scolding, one carefully and dispas- 
sionately analyzes the case, and asks for his own pro- 
nouncement upon its justice or injustice. At such mo- 
ments most boys tell the truth. 

Helpfulness and Unselfishness go together, and both 
are the product of good health and the absence of 
egotism. An invalid is devoid of the spare energy 
needed in the service of others. An egotist is too busy 
with his own small affairs to have time or inclination 
for the service of others. The remedy is good health 
and bigger, more impersonal interests. I have already 
pointed the road to good health, — it is cleanness of 
body, inside and out, of atmosphere, food, drink, cloth- 
ing, habitation ; above all, cleanness of thought. The 
road to unselfishness is not through direct instruction 
or sermonizing. It is by taking the boy's hand in yours, 



SPIRIT 149 

and leading him out of his poor, small, selfish world 
into a world of bigger and more commanding interests, 
where the petty concerns of the self die through inat- 
tention. Salvation, as I have been pointing out, is a 
rebirth, in which we give up the old too-personal life, 
and so gain the whole world. Unselfishness is, indeed, 
a large part of religion, for it is a determining factor 
in one's whole attitude towards life. The majority of 
us have made experiments in selfishness, and have 
learned how lean the harvests are ; and the majority 
of us, as a result of this experience, have genuinely 
turned towards unselfishness as the better mode of life. 
And yet no great progress has been made ; it is still 
a very selfish world, and consequently a very unhappy 
world. The obstacle, I think, lies in our method ; it 
does not sufficiently go to the root of the matter. We 
cannot, with much hope of efficiency, give ourselves 
over to the direct cultivation of either selfishness or 
unselfishness. They are the effects of still deeper and 
more essential causes, and it is with these sources 
that we must deal. If our major interest in life is per- 
sonal we are unavoidably selfish, no matter how saintly 
our pretensions, our philanthropies, our proclamations. 
There is a respectable school of thought which acknowl- 
edges this fundamental fact and teaches that from the 
enlightened selfishness of individuals we must look for 
the grea'test general good. It may be partially true for the 
lusty part of life, from twenty, let us say, on to fifty ; 
but for the whole of life it is not true, since the per- 
sonal life of mortality is doomed to ultimate eclipse and 
failure. Body and spirit go part of this journey to- 
gether, increasing in strength and power. But there 
comes a time for all of us when body lags behind, and 



150 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

spirit, if progress is to continue, must journey on ahead. 
The major concern of the spirit is not with the petty 
personal matters which make up so large a part of the 
life of the body, but with those universal interests 
which concern mankind at large, and outlast the life 
of the body. To get children interested in impersonal 
things is to make them unavoidably unselfish. Solitary 
children, only sons, only daughters, are as a rule ex- 
tremely selfish, for the simple reason that their lives 
have been so overwhelmingly personal. The way out 
is through group activities, through pleasures as well as 
through service. There is a highly personal side to life 
which no normal man would wish to ignore, but it must 
be subservient always to something larger. If life is to 
be permanently successful, and happiness genuine and 
secure, the major interest must be impersonal, must 
have to do with something bigger than the little self, 
must concern itself with the abiding and universal 
things. 

These are the spiritual qualities which it seems to 
me a well-equipped boy of fourteen ought to possess. 
Were they his, all things would be his. Like a modern 
knight, he would go forth to serve, and serving, gain 
everything. Then would Progress, with willing feet, 
resume her journey, and the Beyond-Man become once 
more a possibility. It is for us, parents and educators, 
to work for these spiritual qualities, and to attain them. 
In view of their immense desirability, it is extraordi- 
nary that we should waste these precious fourteen years, 
these plastic, formative years, in the stupid, brutal way 
we do. As practical persons, bent upon sound educa- 
tion, we ought to draw up a formal record of these spir- 



SPIRIT 151 

itual qualities for each boy in our charge, and mark 
his progress in some very definite and illuminating way. 
Only when we were able with entire honesty to write 
plus after each quality would our own work be com- 
plete. Such a record is not for the boy, but for our- 
selves. 

REPORT 



Individual Qualities 




Social Qualities 




Imagination 


+ 


Affection 


+ 


Initiative 


+ 


Manners 


+ 


Sincerity 


+ 


Justice 


+ 


Truthfulness 


+ 


Helpfulness 


+ 


Serenity 


+ 






Concentration 


+ 


Unselfishness 


+ 


Thoroughness 


+ 






Courage 


+ 






Reverence 


+ 






Sense of Honor 


+ 






Lack of Self-Consciousness 


+ 







In commending this report to the serious attention 
of all parents and teachers, I need not, perhaps, enlarge 
upon the transcendent value of the spiritual equipment 
it indicates, nor need I point out that it is far from 
being the possession of the average American boy, 
whether he comes of wealthy or middle-class families, 
or is confessedly of the slums. In the wealthy classes, 
Jack has small chance. Ten to one, he will grow up 
selfish, boorish, unimaginative, lazy, self-conscious. As 
a rule, his misfortune will be the greater, the more 
recent the wealth. In the slums, Jack escapes the dan- 
ger of over-indulgence, but he must carry the heavy 
handicap of genuine destitution and wretched example, 
obstacles so great that he seldom comes to anything. 



152 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

As things go, Jack's best chance is in an average 
middle-class family, for here he has the discipline of 
required service, and at least the hazard of gentle 
example. 

At fourteen, it is quite immaterial whether Jack 
knows how to read or write, or even to do sums. I would 
certainly not make these small arts the direct object of 
effort. If I were sure of having Jack with me during 
the high-school period, from fourteen to eighteen, I 
would much prefer that at fourteen he should not know 
how to read. As soon as a boy begins to read, he passes 
from the glorious world of first-hand experience and ob- 
servation into the shabbier world of the second-hand, 
the world of the reported, and his life becomes less real 
and genuine. The more passionately fond of his books 
he is, the smaller the chance that he will, himself, do 
anything novel or useful. It is so much easier to have 
thrilling adventures by proxy in the world of romance, 
history, travel, biography, science, than it is to observe 
and act for one's self, that I have slowly come to the con- 
clusion that reading, instead of being the immense bene- 
fit it is commonly represented to be, may all too easily 
become, like excessive church-going, a form of laziness 
and self-indulgence. I would prefer that Jack, at four- 
teen, certainly at twelve, should not know how to read, 
because I believe that in the end he would make the 
wiser, bigger, more original man. There is a general 
truth in that often-quoted remark of Hobbes, " If I 
had read as much as other people, I should probably 
have known as little." 

But it will seldom happen that Jack does not, at some 
hour ordained of the gods, decide for himself that he 
wants to read, and when that hour strikes, not even a 



SPIRIT 153 

stupid teacher can stop him. This hunger does not come 
at one particular age, — it comes at any age. In my own 
case, it came at eight. The day was marked by a frantic 
desire to know what was in the books around me, and 
an immense, desolating sense that I could n't find out. 
Along with this desire to read, there came, curiously, a 
second and more difficult ambition, the desire to be " con- 
verted." It seemed to me that if I could only be con- 
verted, and could learn to read, I would ask nothing fur- 
ther. I do not remember the process of learning to read ; 
I only remember that, quite before I knew it, I found 
myself reading, and ever since I have been a great and 
rapid reader, and have known the meaning of delight. 
But I never reached the third degree in reading, that 
economical stage which few attain, but which might 
easily be attainable, in which one reads, not by letters, 
as the child does at first ; or by words, as most grown- 
ups do, first and last ; but by sentences, the way that 
Macaulay and a less well-known genius of my own ac- 
quaintance used to do. My friend seldom picked up a 
book twice ; he could read an ordinary volume of four 
hundred pages in perhaps an hour and a half. When 
he got through, he not only had an astonishing knowl- 
edge of the contents, but he also had a sense of the 
book as a whole which no slower reader ever quite gains. 
At the end, my friend still remembered the beginning 
and the intermediate part. He could picture the whole 
as one can picture a completed building. If we want 
to teach children to read, why not wait for the psycho- 
logical moment, and then do the thing with art and 
efficiency. 

I might add that the process of getting " converted " 
turned out to be a very much more difficult adventure, but 



154 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

vastly more interesting, for at no time can one look upon 
it as an accomplished fact. On the contrary, it involves 
an endless series of rebirths. It is not enough to be born 
again once — one must be born again constantly. Each 
goal approached means a more distant one sighted, until 
in the end we attain peace and serenity in the midst 
of tumult and eternal change. The goal is not here, not 
there. It is immediate, momentary, — it is life itself, an 
endless, creative becoming. 

Somewhat the same objection holds to the other sub- 
jects of the conventional curriculum. The hour not hav- 
ing struck, we do the thing badly and ineffectually. But 
the major objection to the whole scheme of academic in- 
struction for children must forever be that these first 
fourteen years of life are altogether too precious to be 
wasted in this spendthrift fashion. The intellectual har- 
vest is small and stunted ; sometimes so essentially un- 
sound that it handicaps a man for the rest of his life. 
He receives wrong impressions in the vital concerns of 
life, impressions which, in the prompter's box of the sub- 
conscious, later stand between him and a truer comprehen- 
sion. But aside from these grave evils, every moment of 
these precious years is needed for the spiritual culture 
just outlined, and for the bodily accomplishments we are 
now to consider. Body and spirit are always more or 
less impressionable, but never so plastic as in childhood. 



VIII 

BODILY ACCOMPLISHMENTS 

During the years of grace, — the first fourteen years 
of life, — there is no time for formal intellectual culture, 
both because the hour has not yet struck, and because 
these years are needed to the last moment for the vastly 
more important and timely work of cultivating the spirit 
and training the body. This is not a matter of school- 
masterly choice, — it is a matter of organic necessity. 
The trained spirit will meanwhile reach out and gather 
in many wholesome intellectual fruits, because in the 
great drama of life it is the spirit which is the motive 
power. When the proper time comes, at fourteen or 
thereabouts, a boy strong in the spirit will have no 
trouble in mastering language and mathematics and his- 
tory and science. Indeed, he will already have mastered 
them incidentally to an extraordinary degree. But the 
reverse is not true ; the gift of the spirit does not nec- 
essarily come with formal academic culture ; in fact, it 
does not usually come. It is, then, only rational to con- 
cern ourselves first of all with the spirit, the motive 
power, and as the faithful guardians of childhood see to 
it quite beyond peradventure that the spirit is strong, 
informed, and free. 

There might still be time for academic culture were 
it not that these are also the years of grace in the bod- 
ily life, when the organism has the plasticity of rapid 
growth and an impressionability never again equaled in 
the whole of the traditional threescore years and ten. 



156 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

What we would do in the way of bodily training must 
largely be done now, or at least inaugurated now, if we 
are to have any hope of success. The majority of per- 
sons are not accomplished ; few realize how much there 
is to be done in the way of organic training ; and fewer 
still the high necessity of setting about the work while 
there is yet a chance of success. It has been pretty well 
drilled into us that you cannot teach old dogs new tricks ; 
and it has been brought home to us rather painfully, 
perhaps, when we have ourselves tried in mature years 
to master some accomplishment requiring a flexibility 
of body which we no longer possess. As parents and 
teachers, however, it is the positive and constructive 
form of this old saw that we want to bear in mind and 
act upon ; that you can teach young dogs new tricks. 
It is the same in the human world. It is in childhood 
that the accomplishments must be taught, and rightly 
handled they are immeasurably more useful and im- 
portant than all the second-hand material to be found 
in textbooks. What these accomplishments should 
properly include can be readily discovered by asking, 
as we did in the matters of the spirit, what reasonable 
equipment may be expected of a fourteen-year-old boy. 

It was agreed, to start with, that Jack must have 
good health, and that alone will require time and intel- 
ligent effort. But taking this immense good for granted, 
the list of bodily accomplishments is still very long, 
and not one of these accomplishments may properly be 
omitted. 

It is easy to be thorough if one is systematic. I find 
it convenient to cover the range of desirable bodily ac- 
complishments by listing them under such inclusive 
heads as the following : Body without Apparatus ; Body 



BODILY ACCOMPLISHMENTS 157 

with Apparatus ; Eye ; Hand and Eye ; Ear and Voice ; 
Nose and Palate ; Coordinated skill of all the Faculties. 
So grouped, the list is reasonably complete, and at the 
same time convenient. Let us consider these groups in 
order, remembering always that the object of education 
is not to produce athletes, not to produce unusual phy- 
sical development in any direction whatever, but solely 
to train the body in such complete and catholic fashion 
that it shall be the efficient tool of the human spirit. 
And this double culture of soul and body, this acquisi- 
tion of spiritual qualities and bodily accomplishments 
must go on absolutely hand in hand. As Montaigne 
says : " 'T is not a soul, 't is not a body that we are train- 
ing up, but a man, and we ought not to divide him." 

This is the voice of the seer, supported — as the lit- 
erature of insight always is supported — by the results 
of our latest experience and research. We know that 
we ought not to attempt to divide soul and body ; we 
know that we cannot train up a soul, and then, at some 
convenient moment, bestow a well-trained and well- 
equipped body ; and we know with equal certainty that 
we cannot develop the body, and then, when it pleases 
us, bestow the gift of the spirit. Soul and body must 
grow together, and the growing season for the founda- 
tions of both soul and body covers these wonderful years 
of grace between birth and fourteen. 

In considering the Body without Apparatus, it seems 
to me that at fourteen Jack ought to be able to Walk, to 
Run, to Climb, to Jump, to Dance, to Wrestle, to Swim, 
to Dive. In addition, he ought, in a systematic Drill, 
to be able to command his body as a whole. These nine 
basal accomplishments require no apparatus whatever, 



158 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

beyond a companion and the open. None of them may 
be taken for granted. Boys naturally do many or even 
most of these things without instruction, but our con- 
cern as educators is not that they shall simply do them, 
but that they shall do them well. 

It is an art to Walk, a greater one to Run. To walk 
successfully, one must be properly clothed. One should 
wear the least clothing that convention and temperature 
permit, the lightest weight shoes that are durable, and 
no hat. One should carry nothing heavy in the pockets, 
and nothing at all on the back or in the hands. On a 
walking trip of several days, it is usually possible to 
send the necessary articles by parcel post. Many a walk- 
ing trip has been wrecked by a pack, heavy shoes, and 
too much clothing. For those who were either Indians 
or pine trees in their last incarnation, the most perfect 
walking is to glide through the forest without any cloth- 
ing whatever. For the moment, one ceases to be a care- 
burdened man, and becomes an integral part of the great 
forest. All the sensations are heightened. Each step 
reports the texture of Mother Earth, hard or soft, rock 
or dirt, moist or dry, moss or log. Sunshine and summer 
wind smite the body with the sting of life. Grasses and 
low-swinging branches put out their friendly, detain- 
ing hands. And in such noiseless progress, one sees a 
goodly number of forest folk, of deer, and fox and squir- 
rel and pheasant. It is an adventure, and in the heart 
there surges a curious elation, as if the self had died, 
and the spirit had put on the bigness of the enfolding 
Nature. 

But most of our walking is on the highway, and 
there one must dress the best that one can. When one 
is lightly clad, it is an easy matter to walk properly. 



BODILY ACCOMPLISHMENTS 159 

There are, I think, only three necessary injunctions. 
The first is to hold the body erect and free. (This is 
at any time a sound injunction for those who were 
made in the image of God.) The second is to walk from 
the hips rather than from the knees. And the third is 
to walk on the ball of the foot, touching heel to earth 
only when resting. In this way one can breathe freely, 
can swing over long distances easily, and can have the 
sensation of swimming through the intoxicating ether 
instead of plodding over a dull earth. To one who learns 
the trick, walking becomes a keen pleasure, and one 
can cover ordinary distances, twenty or thirty miles, 
let us say, without undue fatigue. I have myself done 
as much as forty-two miles in a day ; and some of my 
boys have done fifty. 

Walking is both an art and a habit. In these days 
of rapid transit, it is not esteemed as highly as it de- 
serves. As a gentleman's sport, I know of nothing 
better. In the first place, it costs nothing, beyond the 
time and the modest entertainment en route. And the 
true gentleman of the future, it seems to me, will in- 
creasingly consider the cost of his pleasures, counting 
those clean which do not depend upon appropriated 
labor-power, and those unclean which necessitate any 
measure of slavery on the part of men or women or 
children. In the second place, one must generally walk 
alone, and, if on good terms with one's self, is sure of 
excellent company ; or if one is so fortunate as to have 
a companion, he is pretty sure to be of the right sort, 
for at least he is neither lazy nor dyspeptic nor indif- 
ferent. And finally, walking has the immense advan- 
tage that one need not follow the crowd, but may go 
where one pleases, over hill and dale, wherever fancy 



160 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

or beauty calls, with no road-map beyond a compass or 
the north star or the friendly sun. And the glorious 
independence of it, to go swinging over creation like a 
god of the dawn. Walking is an art well worth teach- 
ing our boys and girls ; and a habit well worth getting 
them into. 

Nearly all boys run, sometimes for the fun of it, but 
generally to get there. Both objects are good. All the 
boys need is a hint about easy breathing, about keeping 
the body itself fairly quiet, about running from the 
hips and landing always on the ball of the foot. Easy 
running is really a series of graceful springs, and the 
test of it is whether one can keep it up for some dis- 
tance without getting either tired or out of breath. A 
healthy boy ought to be able to run for from two to five 
miles without harm and with genuine profit. Few boys 
can do this, — probably not one boy in a hundred. But 
it is worth doing, both as a physical art and as a cul- 
ture of endurance and will power. To be a good runner 
requires training and intelligence. Like walking, run- 
ning is both an art and a habit, a dangerous one if at- 
tempted when a man is no longer young and is visibly 
over-dressed and over-fed, but a wholesome and useful 
one if acquired during the years of grace. I should be 
sorry to have this praise of running construed into even 
the faintest praise of racing. From what I have seen 
of track-running, and from the distorted faces of the 
winners pictured from time to time in the daily papers, 
I am quite convinced that the strain of such events 
quite exceeds any possible benefit. My contention, 
throughout this whole chapter, is not for athletic prow- 
ess, but for thoroughly trained bodies, that is to say, 
for thoroughbreds. And my high appreciation of thor- 



BODILY ACCOMPLISHMENTS 161 

oughbreds is that they may the more efficiently carry 
out the serious and artistic purposes of life. 

It is the same with climbing and jumping, — one 
must learn the trick when young, or never ; and both 
are worth learning. One may never have to climb a 
tree for any utilitarian purpose, or shinny up a water- 
spout, or creep along the roof of a burning house, but 
the ability to do such things means power to do the 
things that will be needed. In climbing, it is well to 
begin with an old and many-branched tree, where the 
foothold is reasonably secure, and the boy may cultivate 
a steady head as well as obedient muscles. When he has 
gained some confidence, the task may properly be made 
more difficult. In the end, he ought to be able to climb 
a straight pole, — not greased, perhaps, but devoid of 
any appreciable footholds. Climbing brings every mus- 
cle of the body into play, — one must learn both when 
to cling and when to let go, — and it has the great 
merit of immediacy ; the boy must be all there in mind 
as well as body ; there is no chance for inattention and 
wool-gathering. Watch a boy when he is climbing, and 
you will have a picture of reality the superior of which 
no philosopher need seek. 

It is a good plan to combine jumping with climbing, 
to let a boy drop from branches of varying height and 
learn to land on his feet, taking up the impact by a 
judicious use of the muscles of the leg. It is good, too, 
to include "chinning" in the climbing exercises, that 
is, to have a horizontal bar, and train the boy to lift 
himself by his arms until his chin rests for a moment 
on top of the bar. It looks easy, but to do it well, and 
especially to do it a considerable number of times in 
succession, requires no little practice, and a lot of will 



162 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

power as well as muscle power. The chinning exercise 
makes use of apparatus, but of such a kind that it may- 
be taken for granted in any country home. 

If you have ever seen a stag clear a ditch, or a well- 
trained hunter take a five-rail fence, you have felt not 
only genuine admiration, but I venture to say an added 
touch of envy. It may be several generations before 
our boys can be taught to leap a fence without touch- 
ing it, but they can easily be taught to vault a fence, 
right-hand, left-hand, between-hands, and to leap un- 
aided over smaller obstacles. Picture the joy of a cross- 
country walk if you could take with you this ability to 
clear all ordinary obstacles, — the legs of a fawn with 
the soul of a man. 

I do not recommend pole-vaulting, not alone because 
it requires special apparatus, and is extremely danger- 
ous if the pole breaks, but also because it can hardly 
be called a useful accomplishment in everyday life. One 
can gain the same muscular exercise in less hazardous 
and more profitable ways. 

Dancing offers large opportunities of a valuable sort, 
not only as a general bodily exercise, but also in the 
cultivation of grace, of sociability, and even for the ex- 
pression of patriotic and religious emotion. Those who 
have seen the Chicago school-children dance the folk- 
dances of their several nationalities ; or Ruth St. Denis, 
the Invocation to Flame ; or Michael Mordkin, the 
Bacchanale ; or the sweet-faced old priestess at Nikko, 
the Ceremonial Dance of the Temple, will be quite ready 
to believe that the omission of dancing in our individ- 
ual and national life is the unfortunate omission of a 
valuable means of expression. 

In addition to its merit as a purely bodily exercise, 



BODILY ACCOMPLISHMENTS 163 

dancing helps to bridge over the awkward age, and to 
bring boys and girls together under pleasant, wholesome 
conditions. It is more than probable that the mother 
of the family was fond of dancing in her girlhood, and 
gave it up all too soon. It would do her a world of 
good," as well as her children, if she could be their 
teacher, and could gather enough children from the 
neighborhood to make a group of eight or twelve. In 
order to allow all the mothers to share in the benefit, 
they might take turns. If the fathers could lend a hand 
at the piano, or an added partner on the floor, so much 
the better. There is no end of beautiful dances, and of 
large chances for invention. One can add in this simple 
way to the genuine joy of life, and redeem many a long 
evening or rainy afternoon from dullness or mischief. I 
recall with a thrill of pleasure the summer that my sister 
and I spent in an old farmhouse up in Connecticut. 
There were eight or more children of about our own 
age, and nearly every evening we cleared the floor of 
the old-fashioned parlor, and had a lively, jolly dance. 
We went in for all the dances we had ever heard of, 
and when it came to Sir Roger de Coverley, the elders 
also joined in. The most wholesome pleasure costs no 
money ; it only costs the idea and a little initiative. 

Wrestling, like climbing, brings into play about every 
muscle in a boy's body ; but here he must struggle not 
alone against gravity, which works always in the one 
downward direction, but still more against an active, 
aggressive force which may come from any direction 
whatever. Wrestling has the large advantage of teach- 
ing a boy to keep his temper, and to play fair. A boy 
who grows angry and tries to punish his antagonist must 
be ruled out of the game. Here is a fine chance for the 



164 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

father to supervise the exercise, lending such hand as 
may seem wise, and establishing, as nothing else will, a 
spirit of comradeship between himself and his boys. It 
is a great thing when fathers and boys can be genuine 
chums. In America, teachers and boys are more apt to 
be chums, for the fathers are mostly too busy and too 
preoccupied. When comradeship fails between father 
and son, the boy loses a lot, but the father loses still 
more. 

All that is needed in home wrestling is a clear floor 
space and several mattresses. The boys should, of course, 
be barefooted, and should preferably wear only tight- 
fitting trunks. If circumstances permit, the Japanese 
wrestling, jiujutsu, is the art most worth cultivating. 
I attended the jiujutsu school in Tokyo, and was greatly 
impressed, not only with the muscular work going on, 
but even more so with the unfailing courtesy and self- 
control shown by all the boys. Afterwards, I saw an 
exhibition at Cambridge, in Studio House, by two Japan- 
ese students studying at Harvard. Both were short and 
very grave. They bowed so ceremoniously and were so 
apparently deliberate in all their movements that when 
from time to time one of the students flew through the 
air over the shoulder of the other, and landed flat on 
his back, it gave the impression of being part of the 
game and agreed upon beforehand. To the onlooker, 
the performance seemed to require the consent of both 
parties, and to have been permitted, rather than suf- 
fered. A friend of mine who was present, a well-devel- 
oped member of the Cadets, suggested this to one of 
the Japanese students, ard asked what would happen 
if one of the contestants knew nothing of the game, and 
merely struck out to win, in any way he chose. " Would 



BODILY ACCOMPLISHMENTS 1G3 

you like to try?" asked the little student. My friend 
thought that he would. In less than a minute he was 
flying through the air, big man that he was, and landed 
flat on his back, while his small antagonist stood smil- 
ing and bowing. The effect was the more amusing be- 
cause my friend was in very correct afternoon dress, 
and though perfectly good-natured, could not look other- 
wise than droll. In spite of its immense art, or perhaps 
because of it, jiujutsu ought not to be undertaken unless 
one can secure a competent teacher. It might be well 
to begin by reading some good book on the subject. 

Boys take to the water so naturally that we are apt 
to assume that they know how to swim and dive. The 
fact is that many of them never have a chance to learn, 
and for far too many, the one chance is under such haz- 
ardous conditions that the loss of life is hardly forgivable. 
The time to learn to swim, as I have already pointed 
out, is very early in life, the earlier the better. My 
friend of the Cadet Corps now has a small son of his 
own, and he proposes to teach him to swim while he is 
still a baby. That seems the best plan of all, and both 
natural and feasible. A baby might properly learn to 
swim even before he can walk, for the water supports his 
body, and all the little fellow has to do is to strike out 
lustily with arms and legs. Few boys have the good for- 
tune to be taken in hand so early, but it is a safe rule 
to begin at once, any time from one year up to eighty. 
As swimming is partly a natural art, all the teacher 
has to do is to make a few simple, practical suggestions, 
preferably born of his own experience. The first thing 
is to have a boy overcome any possible fear of the water, 
and any repugnance to an involuntary ducking. His fear 
can generally be overcome by showing him experiment- 



166 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

ally the great buoyancy of water and how little muscu- 
lar effort it requires to keep afloat. The repugnance to 
ducking can best be got rid of, not by ducking him, but 
by persuading him to dip his head under water repeat- 
edly, until he has learned to manage his breath and to 
feel no discomfort. A boy who is not afraid, and who 
does not too much mind getting his head under water, 
will easily learn to swim. It has been my own experience 
that it is not wise to use water wings or life preservers 
or other helps to buoyancy. It is much better to have 
a boy begin in shallow water where he has perfect con- 
fidence and can give all his attention to acquiring the 
requisite and coordinated movements of arms and legs. 
If the shore is shelving, it is a good plan for the boy to 
wade out until the water comes up to his chiD, then to 
spring up to the surface and strike out for the shore. 
In the case of little chaps who have learned the rudi- 
ments, it is helpful to have the swimming-master wade 
out into the deeper water, up to his arm-pits, say, and 
have the little fellow swim out to him. In this way the 
boy gets beyond his depth, but he does not lose confi- 
dence because he knows that a pair of strong, friendly 
arms are ready to grasp him in case of need. Later, a 
raft anchored in deep water, not too far from the shore, 
offers a definite objective point. Or better still, as at 
my own camp, an island a couple of hundred feet out 
proposes both a challenge and a test. It is not safe, or 
wise, to have boys swim out indefinitely into deep water, 
with no well-defined goal. If they grow frightened or 
anything goes amiss, it is hard to locate them and they 
become appalled at their own isolation. There should 
always be definite bounds to the swimming-course, and 
the entire course should be within plain sight of a com- 



BODILY ACCOMPLISHMENTS 167 

petent master. The best course is naturally one in the 
open air. A lake fed by clean springs is the most desir- 
able of all, on account of the purity of the water, the 
absence of currents, and the fairly uniform temperature. 
Unfortunately, in America, we are badly off in the 
matter of lakes. It is generally Hobson's choice, — one 
must take river or creek or artificial swimming-tank. 
Rivers, particularly in their upper courses, are as vari- 
able in volume, current, and temperature as the weather 
in the hills which send them forth. A slow, tepid, shal- 
low stream becomes in a single day a cold, muddy tor- 
rent. My own first camp was on the banks of such a 
stream, the Upper Delaware, and I know something of 
the dangers and difficulties. The conditions can only be 
safely met by extreme and unremitting precautions. 

But many localities — in fact, the great majority of 
localities in the United States — do not offer any natu- 
ral facilities for swimming and diving, and one must 
either forego the accomplishment or create artificial 
pools. In addition to its immense value in case of acci- 
dent, swimming is such a perfect exercise, and such a 
joy to every alert boy, that we ought to be building 
swimming-tanks by the thousand. They need not be 
large, they need not be deep, and they need not be ex- 
pensive. A water-tight floor, with a surrounding wall 
of brick, or concrete, or stone, need not cost over a few 
hundred dollars, and will be a source of health and de- 
light to a goodly company of boys. Perhaps twenty by 
thirty feet ought to be the minimum, — fifty by one 
hundred feet would be great luxury. Our present 
swimming-tanks are nearly all objectionable because 
they are located underground in some gloomy basement, 
quite away from the air and light. In a few cases they 



168 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

are even inimical to health. They ought always to be 
aboveground, in the full sunshine. In the Southern 
States, it is wise to forego the use of the tank during 
two or three months, if need be, and have the tank un- 
covered, so that the boys may experience the tonic effect 
of air and sun. In the North, some cover is necessary, 
but it can be made of glass, after the manner of a 
greenhouse, and the place can be warmed and venti- 
lated. The water, it need hardly be said, ought to be 
clean to start with, and ought to be renewed with suffi- 
cient frequency to keep it reasonably pure. If clean, 
wholesome boys use the tank every day, it may properly 
serve in lieu of a bathtub ; but if the tank is public, and 
is used somewhat indiscriminately, every one who goes 
into the water ought first to be required to take a cleans- 
ing shower bath. In some of our public natatoriums, 
the water is not changed often enough, and when you 
reflect that a small boy, especially if just learning 
to swim, is pretty sure to swallow a lot of water, the 
thought is neither pleasant nor hygienic. Clean water, 
pure air, and abundant sunshine are the three essential 
things. 

It goes without saying that where circumstances allow, 
the boys would much better bathe naked. Not only does 
this allow greater freedom of movement, but it also 
means less danger from cramps. The boys are in and 
out of the water many times, and if they wear bathing- 
suits, even trunks, the wet cloth against the bowels is 
apt to make trouble. The " air towel " is also better 
than any fabric, because it is ideally clean and involves 
no question of mixed use. To make the story complete, 
I ought to add that my own preference for air towels and 
naked boys has an even deeper social reason. Towels 



BODILY ACCOMPLISHMENTS 169 

and bathing-suits mean just so much unnecessary trouble 
for some one else ; and in that genuine democracy which 
all aristocrats invite, one is quite as jealous of unneces- 
sary tasks for some one else as for one's self. 

In teaching boys to dive, or, more accurately, in en- 
couraging them to learn to dive themselves, it will be 
wise to have them put cotton in their ears, if there is 
any tendency to ear trouble; and safer, in general, to 
have them first learn to swim. I have had plucky little 
chaps dive off into deep water before they could swim 
a stroke, so sure were they that, as soon as they came 
up, strong arms would be there to pull them out. But 
it is safer to have them swim first, for clear still water is 
very inviting, and our little lad, without fear in his heart, 
might easily be tempted to dive in when no strong arms 
were there to rescue. If a boy hesitates to dive, it is 
sometimes helpful to have him first jump off a raft or 
pier until he has accustomed himself to the sudden 
plunge. He ought to learn to dive from a raft or a low 
spring-board before he tries diving from higher levels. 
My own feeling is that it is more prudent for him not 
to try anything greater than his own height. 

In teaching boys to swim and dive, it is vastly better 
to have regard to the psychological verities than to try 
brutal, catastrophic methods. It may be true that many 
boys have been taught to swim successfully by being 
thrown overboard and made to think that they must 
swim for their lives. But they have suffered a quite un- 
necessary shock, and they have lost confidence in the 
kindness of the grown-up world. In many cases these 
boys experience such an aversion to the water that they 
never again willingly go into it. It is vastly better, not 
only for the swimming itself, but also for the boy's gen- 



170 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

eral development, to remove the mental obstacles, the 
fears and objections, by showing him how groundless 
they are, by explaining and illustrating the great buoy- 
ancy of water, and in this friendly fashion to encourage 
him to swim rather than to browbeat him into it. 

I have said so much about swimming and diving be- 
cause they seem to me a splendid exercise and a most 
useful accomplishment. From a boy's point of view they 
are an inexhaustible source of pleasure. They add im- 
mensely to his feeling of self-mastery and control. In 
reality an educated boy ought to be master of his body 
in the water as well as on the land, and he ought to 
feel that he is master of it. The next generation, or the 
one after it, may gain a similar mastery in the air. 

All the bodily accomplishments which I have been 
so warmly commending — walking, running, climbing, 
jumping, dancing, wrestling, swimming, and diving — 
have the large advantage of being open to every one. 
They cost nothing, and require no apparatus, — even 
dancing, at a pinch, can dispense with instrumental 
music and can proceed to the rhythm of whistling or 
song, and happily they are the most important of the 
bodily accomplishments making for health and grace 
and self-control. I might profitably have added breath- 
ing, for that is a distinct accomplishment which few of 
us have mastered. It ought, however, to be involved in 
all the rest, and it may well be incorporated as a dis- 
tinct exercise in the Swedish Drill. 

The drill is best carried out with a group of boys 
of approximately the same age and strength. A roomy 
wooden platform in the open air is a convenience, but 
a simple grass or dirt court, uncovered, and preferably 
in the full sunshine, is all that is needed. In the warmer 



BODILY ACCOMPLISHMENTS 171 

months, the boys should be barefooted and should wear 
only short running-trousers. This allows a free move- 
ment of arms and legs and trunk and feet. In colder 
weather, the costume should be the same, if the drill 
is carried on indoors. If carried on outside, the boys 
should, of course, be amply protected against chill, but 
they should never be asked to exercise in unnecessarily 
heavy clothing. The old-fashioned sweater, with its muf- 
fling neck-piece, should especially be avoided. I prefer 
the Swedish Drill because it requires no apparatus, 
and because it exercises every muscle in the body. The 
bending movements — forwards, backwards, sideways — 
and the varied torsional movements are particularly 
good for the digestion. The deep breathing and the 
arm-flinging exercises are excellent for strengthening 
the lungs. Many teachers and some parents already 
know the general principles of the Swedish Drill, and 
perhaps a number of the preferred movements. While 
the best preparation for giving the drill would, natu- 
rally, be gained by taking the regular normal course, 
still excellent work can be done by those who have 
merely seen the drill well given and have studied one 
of the several books on the subject. Here, as elsewhere, 
the bodily exercise is only at its best if it goes hand in 
hand with a culture of the spirit. When properly car- 
ried out, the Swedish Drill makes rather large demands 
upon a boy, for it asks such prompt and accurate re- 
sponse through his own exercise of will. A good teacher 
will explain the movements carefully and will himself 
go through them while the class looks on. But when 
the boys are doing the exercises, the teacher will stand 
perfectly still. As already explained, the idea is not that 
they shall imitate him through the eye, but rather that 



172 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

verbal commands shall be promptly and accurately trans- 
lated into muscular movements. A boy must first ap- 
prehend what he is to do, and then do it. He is not like 
sheep mechanically to follow a leader. This feature alone 
makes the drill an admirable discipline in will culture. 
In addition it requires prompt cooperation among the 
boys themselves, and the patience of complete silence. 
If the drill is at all strenuous, twenty minutes is ample, 
thirty minutes at the outside, and it should always be 
followed by five or ten minutes' rest, and a chance to 
freshen up. 

The group drill is best, but if this cannot be arranged, 
a drill may be given to one or two ; or a boy may even 
give it to himself alone. Even five minutes a day will 
accomplish much in the way of health and bodily con- 
trol. In this case, the exercises may well be taken just 
after the boy has had his cold bath, and before he puts 
on his clothes. The movements may wisely be taken in 
units, — perhaps twenty each. It is a good plan to count. 
From five to ten such units — one hundred to two hun- 
dred movements — may be taken each morning and the 
programme changed once a week, or at least once a 
month. These simple movements are admirable for 
growing children, but are even more admirable and 
necessary for literary people and other sedentary work- 
ers. Personally I find that a hundred vigorous move- 
ments directly after the daily bath are better than any 
tonic. The question of health is, I confess, a tiresome 
one, but it must receive due consideration from most 
of us. Few people who have reached middle age, or be- 
yond, have serviceable health unless they work for it. 
A clean, well-exercised, well-disciplined body is the first 
condition of individual and social efficiency. 



BODILY ACCOMPLISHMENTS 173 

In that cultivation of the body as a whole which 
does require apparatus, I should certainly place Riding 
first. In town it is an expensive accomplishment, since 
a good riding-horse costs from three hundred dollars 
up ; and his keep, as much, or more, per year. But all 
boys whose parents can manage it, ought, it seems to 
me, to be brought up in the country, and there, espe- 
cially if the country be in the South or West, horses 
are still cheap enough for any fairly well-to-do person 
to ride. Here in Texas, where I happen to be spend- 
ing a month on an upland ranch, I was offered a serv- 
iceable animal only yesterday for thirty-five dollars ; 
and on my own ranch in California, I rode a beautiful 
young horse that cost but sixty. Even in our older 
communities, a little patience will generally disclose 
a suitable mount that will come within one's means. 
Many families could manage a horse for their boy or 
girl, and, if need be, do without something less impor- 
tant. The time to teach a boy to ride is before he is 
fourteen. He can learn later in life, but he will never 
feel entirely at home in the saddle, never quite to the 
manner born. It is far better for a boy to have a riding- 
horse than to have a motor-cycle or a motor-car. Caring 
for the horse is in itself wholesome, and teaches a boy 
a lot about animals, — knowledge quite worth having. 

In the saddle Jack has splendid exercise and great 
draughts of clear, fresh air. He can go where he pleases, 
regardless of roads, and be once more an independent 
knight and explorer. If he ride without a hat, he will 
never have to jump off to pick it up. If he roll his sleeves 
up to his elbows, he will have a freer hand with the 
reins. If he dispense with whip and spur, he can teach 
his horse to obey the voice. In general, he will find that 



174 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

gentleness accomplishes more than violence, — both for 
himself and the horse. A boy soon learns to ride well. 
All he needs are a few practical hints, and a mount. 
He must, of course, be taught to hold the reins in his 
left hand ; to keep his right hand free ; to mount al- 
ways from the left ; to have firm grasp of the reins be- 
fore he attempts to mount ; to spring into the saddle, 
if possible, without catching hold of anything, or if he 
must have help, to grasp the pommel rather than the 
rear. It is now considered better form to stick close to 
the saddle, but a boy who has learned to rise and fall 
in his saddle, with ease, — that is, to jockey, — can 
ride the roughest horses and go the longest distances 
without undue fatigue. 

A word more as to the horse itself. It seems to me 
criminal to allow a boy to ride a vicious animal, and 
foolish to compel him to ride an ill-trained one. In 
nearly every countryside there is some lover of horses, 
with a natural gift that way, who will for five or ten 
dollars break a horse of any distinctly bad habit, and 
teach him enough in the way of gaits and response to 
signals to make him a fairly comfortable mount. Up in 
New Hampshire, last summer, I had a young driving- 
horse which clung to the inconvenient habit of declin- 
ing to back. A neighbor of mine, a boy who is a verita- 
ble genius with horses, spent perhaps ten minutes with 
the animal, and never again did I have a moment's trou- 
ble. For a short afternoon turn, we all love a good brisk 
gallop, but for a day's jaunt, an easy, steady trot is the 
better. The boy who can jockey successfully can easily 
outride a more robust companion. In California, my 
boys and I rode one hundred and sixty-five miles in 
three days, and felt quite justified in laughing at those 



BODILY ACCOMPLISHMENTS 175 

gallant generals who grumbled so loudly when Mr. 
Roosevelt ordered ninety miles in the same time. 

As to the saddle, the choice lies between two types, 
the small English pad of leather, with its slender metal 
stirrup, and the comfortable, deep-seated, horned saddle 
of the army and the plains, with its broad wooden stir- 
rup and leather foot-guard. The English saddle does 
well enough for park riding, — I would even grant 
that it is the prettier of the two, — but for the rough- 
and-tumble, all-around riding that we want our boy to 
undertake, the horned or Mexican saddle is much the 
better. With reasonable care, Jack can hardly be un- 
seated ; the broad wooden stirrup does not tire even a 
bare foot, and in the event of accident, the leather 
guard allows easy disengagement of the foot, and so 
prevents a thrown rider from being dragged. A boy's 
education can hardly be considered complete unless, 
among other manly accomplishments, he knows how to 
care for a horse, to saddle him, and to ride him. 

Much may also be said for driving. A boy who can- 
not harness a horse properly and drive him with 
reasonable skill will often be put to inconvenience, 
and may easily be less useful than he could have 
wished. It is such an easy accomplishment that it 
really seems too bad not to impart it. At some time or 
other, all of us who live active lives are called upon to 
drive a horse. It looks very simple, but it is hardly 
safe unless we have been taught how, and have also 
been taught to look over both harness and running- 
gear, and to know whether all is sound and in good 
order. In spite of the keen competition of the automo- 
bile, the horse still holds his own, and under many 
circumstances is still the better motor power of the 



176 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

two. The knowledge of how to feed and care for a 
horse, how to saddle and harness him, how to ride and 
drive him, is a useful accomplishment, as well as a 
large pleasure. 

Bicycles have not retained the first place that they 
once occupied, but as a means of quick and cheap 
transit they have lost none of their original usefulness. 
In a level country — and most of our immense area is 
level — it is quite worth while for a boy to own a 
stout bicycle, and to know how to use it. He need not 
weaken his heart by racing uphill. He need not im- 
peril his own life and other lives by reckless scorching. 
He can be taught to be as reasonable here as else- 
where. 

A boy under fourteen ought not to be allowed to 
run either a motor-car or a motor-boat, for the danger 
is too great, both to himself and to others. But when 
the day comes that he is curious to learn, it is well to 
explain the engine to him, and the construction of the 
transmission mechanism and the steering apparatus, 
and to teach him the way it all operates. It may not 
be prudent for him to run either car or boat at present, 
but it is highly desirable that he should be an intelli- 
gent passenger, en route to captaincy. 

After a small boy knows how to swim, he may prof- 
itably learn to paddle a canoe, to row a light-weight 
boat, and in somewhat sheltered water, to sail a skim- 
ming-dish or other easily handled craft. The value of 
this nautical knowledge, as an accomplishment, will be 
limited, of course, to the amount of time he spends 
near usable bodies of water, and may easily be small ; 
but the open-air life, and the educational value of 
learning to manage for himself, — " to paddle his own 



BODILY ACCOMPLISHMENTS 177 

canoe," — will have large and permanent results. As 
a source of wholesome, manly pleasure, all forms of 
boating appeal to the majority of small boys, and with 
proper precaution need not be unduly hazardous. It is 
manifestly foolhardy to allow a very small boy to go 
out in a canoe alone, or to allow any boy to go in a 
canoe or rowboat before he knows how to swim. Nov is 
it prudent for a boy to sail a boat of any sort in a 
crowded or treacherous waterway. And there are obvi- 
ous cautions in regard to Jack's conduct in all small 
boats, — that he must not rock them, or attempt to 
stand up, or under any conditions change places with 
another voyager. In a word, in small boats, as else- 
where, there is always need for common sense. 

Our winter sports in the colder states are well 
developed and well known. There are few Northern 
boys who do not know how to skate, and how to guide a 
sled or toboggan down an icy hill, or who have not 
at some time adventured forth on skis or snowshoes. 
They may even have tried the hazard of ice-boating. 
Many of these sturdy lads prefer winter to summer, 
for in the ice and snow and stinging frost they find the 
greater fun. All these winter sports are of large value, 
but they need the supervision of intelligent parents 
and teachers to see that they are not unduly hazard- 
ous, that they are done well, that they do not overtax 
the childish strength, and, above all, that they do not 
absorb too much of the short winter day. 

All these accomplishments, which involve the body 
as a whole, with or without contributory apparatus, 
are of fundamental value, since they tend to establish 
good health, and to make the body an obedient tool in 
the hands of the spirit. If these accomplishments are 



178 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

imparted pari passu with those qualities of the spirit 
which have already been urged, they will do much to 
give us a race of Americans, stronger, more beautiful, 
more accomplished, more lovable than any we have yet 
known. They are the foundations of education upon 
which the subsequent intellectual life must be securely 
built. But the story of the body is not yet complete, 
even for these first fourteen years, for this is also the 
time when we must cultivate the faculties, the five 
senses, when we must implant a wide range of interests, 
and when we must develop taste. The hour for this 
organic work has struck, because it is now that the 
organism is plastic and impressionable. With so many 
more important things to be attended to, it is easy to 
understand why an intelligent parent or teacher de- 
clines to squander these precious years on the formal 
studies of the old curriculum. The formal studies can 
be given later and with far greater efficiency. But the 
bodily accomplishments must be given now or never. 

If this chapter produces the impression that I am 
here advocating a distinctly Spartan discipline in the 
upbringing of boys, I shall be pleased, for that is pre- 
cisely the impression which I wish to produce. In the 
course of a long and busy life I have known hundreds 
of boys, even thousands, and many of them intimately. 
Some of them are delightful, high-minded products of 
our aging civilization. But the majority are neither 
strong in the spirit nor robust in the body, and their 
intellectual achievements are correspondingly meager. 
I no longer blame these boys. I blame the older gen- 
eration, the parents and teachers who allowed the boys 
to believe that they could attain excellence as human 
beings without paying the price of self-discipline and 



BODILY ACCOMPLISHMENTS 179 

self-mastery. To grow from the smaller into the larger 
self is not an easy process. When we make it easy, we 
make it impossible. The great need of the hour is for 
resolute spirits in robust bodies. 



IX 

SHARPENING THE TOOL 

In a recently published " Life " of our most amazing 
English dramatist, it is stated that he wanted to do 
everything that he could n't. And he explains, with 
characteristic humor, that his passion for art, with 
Michael Angelo for his model, was due to the fact that 
he couldn't draw; and his passion for music, to the 
fact that he could neither sing nor play. He never 
wanted to write, because it never occurred to him that 
literary ability was exceptional. Having it himself, he 
thought that all men had it. Those who have trained 
faculties, and the consequent ability to express them- 
selves in artistic performance, can never know or ap- 
preciate the passionate longing for adequate expres- 
sion on the part of the poor souls who were set on fire 
by the flame of purpose when it was already too late 
to sharpen the tools for any effective work. It may 
easily be that no amount of education, even during the 
wonderful years of grace, could make a man master 
of all the fine arts, or indeed of any considerable num- 
ber of them. It may perhaps be true that in order to 
be a master in any one or two directions a man must 
throw over all other pretensions and concentrate upon 
the chosen art. It is the common belief that a specialist 
must pay the price of his preeminence by a willing 
and tolerably complete ignorance of about everything 
else. Many specialists illustrate and confirm this belief. 
One may be genuinely grateful for these contributions 



SHARPENING THE TOOL 181 

of the expert, and still pity the man himself, But the 
•time for specializing is not during childhood, and espe- 
cially not during the first fourteen years of life. This 
is the time to develop powers and to enlarge aptitudes. 
One never knows what one can do until one tries. And 
my own belief is that while a man ought to strive to 
be a master in some one department of human effort, 
he will be the greater master, as well as the larger and 
more lovable man, if he strive with almost equal ardor 
to develop himself in all directions. The choice of a 
vocation ought to be deferred, at any rate, until a boy 
has had the chance to look over the field. Many a man 
goes to the university with a pretty definite plan of 
life mapped out before him, only to find on coming 
into contact with other lines of research and other 
workers that his own proper vocation is in wholly dif- 
ferent channels from his original purpose. Sometimes 
he does not discover his metier until several years after 
graduation ; and sometimes — worst luck of all — he 
never discovers it. We ought to resist specialization in 
a boy, not aggressively and audibly, but by quietly 
letting him run the whole scale of boyish preferences, 
from soldier to missionary, from cowboy to lawyer, 
without taking any of these passing whims seriously, 
and above all, without ever holding him to an out- 
grown choice. It is clearly not our business to choose 
for him, but it is our proper office to enlarge the pos- 
sibilities of his choice by giving him an adequate tool 
to work with. It is in this spirit, the desire to equip a 
boy for a large life of participation in the best activ- 
ities of his day and generation, that I would devote 
a considerable part of his first fourteen years to the 
cultivation of the five senses. The first thing is to get 



182 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

the organs themselves in good condition, — the eye, 
the ear, the hand, the nose, the throat, — and the sec- 
ond thing is to increase the skill and range of their 
operations. 

The practical way to reach an adequate programme 
of sense-training is the simple method of enumerating 
the senses, and working out under each sense, or under 
some suitable combination of related senses, such dis- 
cipline as will bring them to the greatest efficiency. 
There are only five senses to be developed, and the 
activities of our material life are carried on by some 
combination of these tools working at the bidding of 
the spirit. Eye and hand naturally work together, 
just as ear and voice do, and tasting and smelling. 
The object in cultivating the senses is dual. It is not 
only to make a more useful human being in the world 
of affairs, but also to make a more complete human 
being in the world of the intellect. The senses gather 
the material for the thought life and determine in part 
its quality. If the senses bring abundant and sound 
material, if they report the great outer world fully and 
accurately, the thought life is active and trustworthy. 
The majority of us do not see, do not hear, do not 
touch, do not taste, do not smell, with any degree of 
comprehension or accuracy. In many cases the tissues 
are diseased, and the sense-organs themselves do not 
function properly or adequately. The first step towards 
a radical betterment is to restore health to the tissues 
and organs. It is evidently a foolish waste of money to 
employ craftsmen and artists and musicians to teach 
our children, if the children themselves are not, first of 
all, in good health, and the sense-organs, which we 
want to cultivate, in good order. Good health, as I 



SHARPENING THE TOOL 183 

have been pointing out with friendly and perhaps tire- 
some iteration, is the first and fundamental task of all 
education. The school, like the home, should be first 
of all an efficient sanitorium, making delicate children 
strong, and strong children still stronger. It is a grave 
indictment that under the present regime children are 
so frequently withdrawn from school on account of 
their health. 

While the health is being built up, by a clean, 
simple, outdoor life, the sense-organs themselves must 
be carefully examined by qualified experts before we 
start out to train the senses. When we know perfectly 
well that only a small per cent of civilized persons have 
normal eyesight, it is manifestly absurd to formulate 
an educational system on the assumption that all chil- 
dren see well. As a known matter of fact they do not 
see well. It is to be hoped that in the years to come 
normal eyes will be far more common than at present, 
but meanwhile we have to deal with children, most 
of whom are defective. Evidently the first thing to 
do is to examine every pair of eyes, to correct such de- 
fects as we may by suitable and carefully carried-out 
gymnastics, and when we must, to supply appropriate 
glasses. Any parent or teacher, not himself too near- 
sighted, can detect the more obvious cases, the children 
who squint their eyes over their tasks, who jump up 
from their seats and get as near the blackboard as pos- 
sible, who bring paper and book too near the face ; but 
it is safer and more rational to have every child offi- 
cially examined. A nearsighted or astigmatic child in a 
classroom, or at large, is much in the position of an 
ordinary child asked to report things beyond the hori- 
zon. It is too absurd, and yet parents and teachers, 



184 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

professing common sense, are constantly doing this 
very stupid thing. 

It is the same in the matter of hearing. Dr. Blake, 
of Boston, tells me that in the New England climate, 
at least, probably not more than sixty per cent of the 
population have normal hearing. Nearly half of us are 
partly deaf and in many cases from preventable causes. 
It is an educational impropriety to put up with a re- 
movable defect since it not only diminishes a man's 
efficiency in the present, but also tends to become more 
acute with age. Instead of asking whether a child can 
read and write and cipher, an intelligent schoolmaster 
ought first to ask whether he can hear perfectly. Many 
children appear stupid merely because they do not hear. 
If there is any defect, the next step is to discover the 
cause, and the final and important step is to bring about 
as speedy and complete a cure as the case permits. 
Many cases of deafness can be traced directly to ca- 
tarrh, and the treatment will have to be both local and 
constitutional, and, above all, persistent. Good health, 
good circulation, cleanness, open-air and sunshine, all 
these are needed before we need the services of a 
music-master, or, indeed, of any teacher whatever. 
When you reflect how shut off deaf persons are from so- 
cial intercourse and inspiration, it would seem as if for 
nearly half our children physicians are much more 
needed than schoolmasters. 

The sense of taste depends largely upon the sense of 
smell ; and this, in turn, upon a wholesome condition 
of the mucous membrane. The same good influences, 
therefore, which make for acute hearing also make for 
acute taste and smell. Education has never laid any 
stress upon sound organs of taste and smell, and has 



SHARPENING THE TOOL 185 

never, I believe, attempted to cultivate the senses them- 
selves. But it is quite clear that to have the sense or- 
gans themselves in good order is an essential part of 
that general good health for which education ought pri- 
marily to work ; and to have taste and smell alert and dis- 
criminating is to add materially both to the content of 
thought and to the general efficiency of the organism. 

The sensitiveness of the hand depends upon general 
health, and more especially upon the health of the mus- 
cular and nervous system. The sensitiveness is height- 
ened by suitable exercise given either in the drill or 
separately ; and by keeping the hand clean and reason- 
ably free from callous growths. A thoroughgoing boy 
has a proper contempt for soft, white hands. He wants 
his hands to be brown and strong and reasonably hard, 
even a trifle disfigured if it has been in a very good 
cause. But there is a speedy limit to the value of this 
sort of toughening. A boy loses manual power if the 
hand is abused or overhardened in either work or sport. 
It is much more sensible to use a stout glove when- 
ever the operation in hand threatens to make the in- 
strument less delicate and sensitive. Some years ago 
musicians and others made the experiment of cutting 
that inconvenient tendon which so hampers the free 
movement of the ring finger, and makes certain piano 
passages exceedingly difficult. I declined the operation 
myself in the fear that loss of grasping power in hand- 
ling delicate instruments in the laboratory might easily 
offset any gains in general flexibility. But without any 
recourse to surgery one can easily devise for one's self 
hundreds of simple exercises calculated to increase the 
power and suppleness of the hand, and our control over 
its service. 



186 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

But even in thoroughly healthy boys, the sense- 
organs often render most partial and imperfect service 
because they have never been duly trained. It is a case 
of inertia, — the trouble is with the sluggish spirit. A 
boy may be fairly bursting with good health, and have 
eyes and ears and hands and all the rest of the organ- 
ism so perfectly normal that one could ask for nothing 
more, and yet the boy himself may give a very indif- 
ferent account of the universe around him, and may be 
distressingly clumsy in both his bodily performances 
and his mental processes. The quality of his sensations 
depends upon something else in addition to the health 
of the tissues and the anatomical perfection of the or- 
gans. It depends upon the will back of it all, upon the 
fine organization of the brain centers connected with 
the outer sense-organs. It is, apparently, a question of 
the nice organization of the brain tissue, of its com- 
plexity and degree of development. The perfect eye 
must still be taught to see ; the perfect ear, to hear ; 
the perfect throat, to sing ; the perfect hand, to exer- 
cise its cunning. And this can be done only by making 
the sense-exercise quantitative. It has long been recog- 
nized that we have only so much science as we have 
mathematics. It must now be realized that we have only 
so much educational organic training as we have meas- 
ured exercises. The faculties must be given the dis- 
cipline of use, but they are only trained when they 
are taught to do something definite and predetermined. 
A street urchin, with vast lung power, may be able to 
make a prodigious noise, and yet it may be impossible 
ever to teach him to sing. Those of us who advocate 
manual training, or more properly speaking, organic 
training, as an integral part of genuine culture, are 



SHARPENING THE TOOL 187 

frequently taunted with the inquiry as to why, if man- 
ual training has such a high educational value, the man 
who digs ditches and spends his whole day in manual 
labor is not a better social product than the college- 
bred. But such a criticism is quite without point and 
merely shows that the question at issue has never been 
apprehended. The ditch-digger is not in any sense a 
product of manual training, for his labor is mere 
bodily exercise of the most mechanical sort. There is 
nothing quantitative about it, — the sense- culture and 
intellectual reactions are at a minimum. The personal 
product, under favorable conditions, may be bodily 
strength, but it is never skill. And it must always be 
remembered that we have no such thing as a detached, 
pure perception. Every perception, however simple, 
contains small immediate content, and a very large in- 
gredient of both memory and anticipation. Any expe- 
rienced sensation must be interpreted and we can only 
interpret it in terms of what is past or what is expected. 
Perception is not at all the simple thing which at first 
sight it appears to be. As M. LeEoy puts it, " Percep- 
tion is always the fulfillment of guesswork." Once 
more, it is only possible to educate when we educate 
both body and spirit. Even with perfect sense-organs 
we can only perceive what we set out to perceive. 

The whole object of this immensely valuable organic 
training, during boyhood at least, is to sharpen the 
tool, to prepare the body the better to carry out the 
commands of the spirit. 

Let us turn now to the specific problem. In training 
the eye and hand, for example, it is not necessary to 
systematize the work, especially in the earlier stages. 
Any parent or teacher of ordinary intelligence who has 



188 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

caught the idea that a trained hand and a trained eye 
are desirable educational results will find no difficulty 
in realizing them. He may well begin with the eye 
alone, and train it to discriminate in matters of color, 
shade, distance, texture, and shape. Then the hand 
may be brought into the work, and taught to trace out- 
lines and explore surfaces, confirming and extending 
the testimony of the eye. It is significant that we 
call a certain type of hand artistic, for the artist sees 
as well as works with his long, wonderful hand. A 
Japanese workman may truthfully be said to look at a 
thing with his hands as well as with his eyes. Be- 
tween the clumsy-handed and the skillful there is a 
whole void of lost perceptions. In a world whose cul- 
ture is too largely linguistic and mathematical, and 
too little organic, we have taxed our eyes and brains 
too much, and have too little utilized the willing service 
of our hands. Mme. Montessori has shown that chil- 
dren can learn to read and write quicker through the 
hands than the eyes, quicker by repeatedly passing the 
fingers over the outlines of the letters than by inertly 
staring at them. It is, I think, a safe generalization 
that those events which are accompanied by appropri- 
ate muscular activity, make the deeper and more last- 
ing impression upon the memory. Manual training at 
its best does not mean merely constructive work, a 
sublimated form of carpentry, but also perceptive work 
as well. I have known of a mineralogist who could, 
blindfolded, determine all the more common minerals 
simply through the sense of touch, and we all know 
with what marvelous skill the blind use the hand for 
seeing, and the dumb for speaking. It is sheer peda- 
gogical laziness to make our current education so 



SHARPENING THE TOOL 189 

preponderating^ literary, and to neglect such a wonder- 
working organ as the hand. The first cost of the liter- 
ary education is less, but in the long run it is the more 
expensive form of education, for we get so much less 
for our money. It is more important that a boy should 
have perceptive hands than that he should know the 
contents of many textbooks ; and the time to give him 
perceptive hands is while he is still under fourteen. If 
a boy has had this training of the hand, he may easily 
be taught to draw and paint, and to use the simpler 
tools in wood-working and clay-modeling. But here 
again we must ever remember that what we are after 
is an inner result, a training of the spirit by which it 
can express itself through hand and eye. Such a result 
can only be gained by making the work self-prompted 
and self-directed. At this stage of the process, the ob- 
jective result is in itself of small importance. It makes 
little difference what the boy turns out, but it makes a 
lot of difference whether the product expresses him- 
self, and whether, as the work progresses, it gives evi- 
dence of increasing power and control. The objective 
utility element in children's work must not mislead us. 
I should say that at first it ought to be wholly in- 
cidental. Society does not look to children and boys to 
supply it with even the small conveniences of crafts- 
manship, and certainly not to contribute any art work 
in either drawing or painting or sculpture. The prob- 
lem is to provide the hour, the room, the implements, 
the materials, the judicious hints, and to allow the boy 
a chance to master his medium and to express himself 
in it. Much of our manual-training work, our wood-work, 
clay-modeling, sewing, basketry, paper-work, is less 
valuable than it might be just because it fails to do 



190 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

this, fails to bring about genuine self-expression through 
genuine self -activity. We have such a passion for sys- 
tem and for tangible results that we offer so many 
weeks, so many lessons, so many projects, all planned 
by some mind other than the boy's ; and then when we 
have taught him to imitate others rather than to ex- 
press himself, we measure the value of his work by 
marking the product itself apart from the little worker, 
rather than by estimating the purpose and growth to 
which the product bears witness. 

Imagine some little boys gathered together in a room 
and that we are possessed by the happy idea of train- 
ing their eyes and hands. We must begin by remem- 
bering that they will get little eye culture by simply 
staring, — that is as bad form educationally as it 
is socially. To be helpful and quantitative the exer- 
cise must go along with some movement of the body or 
hand. For example, how large is the room ? To sit still 
and guess is a very futile operation. The architect or 
prospective householder will want to know in terms of 
feet and inches. But we are not now dealing with him. 
We are dealing with a small boy, and would much 
better select some personal unit. Suppose we suggest 
that he pace off the distances, the length and breadth. 
This is something genuine and organic, and even a 
small boy can do it without any outside help. Several 
may want to try. They will get different results, and 
in the dispute as to which is right, they will naturally 
repeat their pacing, and each boy will come to some 
rough standard. It will not take long to see that the 
paces had unequal values, and that if they are to give 
a reliable measurement they must be made as uniform 
as possible. Each small boy will want to introduce into 



SHARPENING THE TOOL 191 

his pace a quantitative element, one that he can only 
gain by learning at each step to put forth the same 
amount of muscular energy. It will also be seen that 
Jack's paces are not the same as Bob's or Dick's. 
When it comes to deciding how high the room is, it 
will be evident at once that pacing is quite out of the 
question, and that some other method must be devised. 
Jack may suggest that a couple of poles, one touching 
the floor, and one the ceiling, and tied together where 
they overlap, will serve the purpose, since the com- 
pound pole may be stretched on the floor, and its 
length paced off, as before. Or Bob may think that if 
Jack stood up against the wall, Dick and he could 
guess how many Jacks it would take, one above the 
other, to reach the ceiling. Or Dick may add that 
if they knew the height of the door, they could 
probably guess the distance from the top of the 
door to the ceiling and so know the height of the room. 
Such work will not go far without suggesting to the 
boys the great practical advantage of a standard meas- 
ure, — foot or yard or meter. When this thought has 
been well established, and the boys have gained some 
skill in estimating distances, the process can be re- 
versed, and they may profitably exercise themselves in 
laying off given distances, small at first, then larger 
and larger, until they have learned to pace off a hun- 
dred feet, a hundred yards, a half a mile, a mile. 
Afterwards they can test these results with a surveyor's 
tape. It is not the convenience of estimating distances 
that we are after, though that is of distinct value, but 
something of far greater value, — the cultivation of 
the quantitative sense. Ground areas may well be 
included in these exercises. In California I had my 



192 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

boys learn to pace off a square containing just one 
acre. 

No parent or teacher, perhaps, will carry out just the 
process I have outlined, but if he will do something 
like it, he will find the time well spent. Boys trained 
in this way will attach a real meaning to the words 
"foot," "yard," "mile," "acre." 

In determining colors and shades of color, the eye 
must, of course, work quite alone, but it can be aided 
by the enforced attention of well-arranged contrasts ; 
first, the strong crude contrasts between unlike colors, 
and later, the subtle contrasts between different shades 
of the same color. Very early in the work a boy's at- 
tention ought to be called to the fact that as the land- 
scape is never of one color, so colors themselves have 
no absolute value, but are always relative, conditioned 
by their neighbors and by the degree of illumination. 
These are very obvious facts, but they are commonly 
the property of artists only. They are seldom realized 
in house-painting or even in dress. 

Not only should all this organic work of hand and 
eye be self-prompted and self-directed, but as far as 
possible it ought to be free-hand. This may seem at first 
blush an odd way to develop quantitative values, but 
it must be remembered that the quantitative sense is 
subjective and not objective, and that it must be devel- 
oped accordingly. If the work is constantly gauged by 
rule and measure, it may be made objectively accurate, 
but the process itself reduces to the visual discipline of 
making two lines register, and does not develop any- 
thing so inner and subtle as the quantitative sense. An 
error of ten per cent in free-hand work may be a better 
educational result than a deviation of one tenth of one 



SHARPENING THE TOOL 193 

per cent in measured work. The common preference 
for measured work comes from the over-emphasis which 
nearly all critics place upon the product, and still more, 
perhaps, from our incurable laziness. It is easier to 
gauge and mark the measured work than it is intelli- 
gently to estimate the free-hand craftsmanship. Too 
many teachers would prefer to exhibit a pile of con- 
ventional little pen trays, all the same size and equally 
uninteresting, or a pile of little table doilies, all the 
same size and all ugly, than to venture the less self- 
evident merit of genuine educational work. The prod- 
ucts of manual training in wood or clay or cloth or 
paper or rafia ought to be as individual and unlike as 
the minds of the little workers. These products ought 
to express their thoughts, not ours, their ideas of form 
and color and design, not ours. The dreadful uniform- 
ity in modern education, even in the so-called new ed- 
ucation, tenrpts one at times to agree with those who 
quite openly proclaim that education, as now carried 
on, is a doubtful blessing, a barrier to progress, instead 
of a help. We do not want people uniform, — not 
even if they were all as nice as one's self! We want 
them heterogeneous to the last wholesome degree, each 
precious individuality saved, developed, and utilized. 
Many of the earlier friends of manual training have 
lost much of their original interest, not only because the 
training is being exploited more and more for commer- 
cial purposes, but also because it is more and more 
going over to the devil of uniformity. 

In developing the hand and eye, the boys must, for 
practical reasons, be gathered into" classes, but the ac- 
tual work must, for educational reasons, be essentially 
individual. General suggestions may be given to the 



194 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

class as a whole, and many sound exercises evolved 
which require team work, but these are the exceptions ; 
or perhaps we ought to say that even in team work, 
each boy must have a specific task and be responsible 
for that. Day in and day out, each boy must have his 
own proper work. This is entirely feasible, even in a large 
class, when you bear in mind that the need of direction 
and of formal discipline are both reduced to the minimum 
by the simple fact that each lad is carrying out his own 
genuine plans, and under the stimulus of a wholesome 
self -activity is little prone to get into mischief. It is the 
idle boy who gives trouble, or the boy who has some un- 
suitable and alien task in which he can feel no honest 
interest. Without the push of a genuine motive, some 
inner necessity, all school work, like all outside work, 
comes to nothing, for it fails to express the boy himself ; 
unless, indeed, it express a veritable fault of character, 
— his willingness to go through the motions of carry- 
ing out some one else's will. Docility, in the new edu- 
cation, is not accounted a virtue, but a grave defect . 
There are many specific tasks which an intelligent parent 
or teacher wishes his boys to do promptly and thor- 
oughly, but he wishes them to act from an inner 
impulse, not rebelliously under protest. This newer 
education concerns itself primarily with the impulse, 
and only incidentally with the task. In a word, educa- 
tion is, first and last and always, an inner process. 

In the work-shop (and I think that this is a much 
better term than the pedagogical circumlocution, " the 
wood-working department ") it is wise to begin with 
the simplest tool, say the sloyd knife. It ought to be 
sharp, and consequently it is dangerous. In putting 
such a tool into a boy's hands, the teacher may wisely 



SHARPENING THE TOOL 195 

call attention to its sharpness, and the wisdom of being 
careful, but he ought not to show the boy how to use 
it. Left with the knife and a stick of wood, the boy 
will soon discover how to proceed ; only when he has 
come to the end of his own devices, ought the teacher 
to offer any suggestions. Then they will mean some- 
thing and will, as a rule, be eagerly welcomed. In 
selecting something to make, the boy must have the 
fullest possible liberty, but must of course be kept 
within the reasonable limits of his own powers, and the 
resources of the shop and lumber-pile. If he has an idea 
of his own, so much the better. If he is devoid of this 
originality, he may find some project to his mind by 
looking over the models on exhibition in the school- 
room, or by watching the work of the other boys. He 
may not be up to designing his early projects, but if 
they are to have any value, he must at least be up to 
selecting them. All in good time, the other woodwork- 
ing tools may be taken up, the saw, the plane, the hammer, 
the chisel, the gauge, the auger, and the rest. As before, 
the boy ought to be left to discover all he can of their 
use before the teacher intrudes his own knowledge. 

It is only elementary courtesy not to laugh at a boy 
when he makes his first crude but brave beginning. 
Ridicule is a bit of genuine disloyalty on the part of 
parent or teacher, for, in proposing the task, they have 
themselves created the possible embarrassment of the 
situation. On the contrary, the boy must be encour- 
aged to go ahead and find out, to make mistakes and 
to correct them, until finally out of defeat he learns to 
win victory. As Leibnitz so well said, " Show me a 
man who has never made a mistake, and I will show 
you a man who has never done anything." 



196 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

I have especially spoken of wood-working because it 
is such a practical and excellent way of training both 
hand and eye. By intelligent attention to the height of 
the work-benches, and to the boy's position in handling 
his tools, the wood-working can also be made a valuable 
gymnastic and health-giver. But it is quite the same 
in all the other forms of educational manual training, 
in drawing, painting, modeling, sewing, and the rest. 
The one formula holds for all : tools, material, oppor- 
tunity in the presence of an older artist who is skilled, 
sympathetic and silent. God give us grace to hold 
our tongue, and keep our hands off, — this ought to be 
the daily prayer of every parent and teacher who essays 
the task of sharpening a child's faculties. The final 
test is not whether a boy has made a whole lot of 
wooden projects, and modeled a whole lot of animals 
and ornaments, and drawn a book full of sketches and 
designs, and painted a rainbow into earthly shapes, but 
rather whether there has been developed the trained 
eye and perceptive hand which can be depended upon 
henceforth to render sure and instinctive expression to 
the purposes of the will, and at the same time yield 
accurate and comprehensive report of the outer world. 

In training the voice and the ear, the teacher is 
forced to take a more positive and intrusive part, for 
here he must supply the standard and correct the per- 
formance. The musical scale is not one of the eternal 
and natural things of life. It is natural in the sense 
of being a product of aesthetic evolution, but it is 
wholly artificial in being a convention which is differ- 
ent among different peoples, and even different with 
the same people in different periods. One has only to 
compare ancient Greek music with modern orchestral 



SHARPENING THE TOOL 197 

scores, or the music of modern Japan with the music 
of modern Germany to realize the evolutionary charac- 
ter of musical taste and standards. Within my own 
memory music declared impossible has since been ac- 
cepted, and even advanced to the highest post of honor. 
It is quite absurd to say with Thoreau that the birds 
offer a better concert than can be had at Symphony 
Hall, for in point of fact they don't. They offer a 
few monotonous notes, repeated, for the most part, in 
a very monotonous and tiresome way. There are few 
more irritating noises in our noisy daily life than those 
produced by an industrious canary bird. Many of the 
sounds of nature are agreeable, but it is sheer romance 
to call them music. In reality, music is a highly con- 
ventional and artificial thing, and even among the well- 
born is not to be taken for granted. It must be taught, 
but if it is taught intelligently, the children will learn 
with genuine delight. What is natural is the desire to 
make a noise, to shout, to sing in sheer exuberance of 
spirit, and with little regard to the logarithms of the 
diapason. That is the instinct to be taken hold of. 
The children must be given something definite to do, 
and encouraged to do it with all their might and main, 
and then there will be little trouble. I have seen rest- 
less, unruly children reduced to order and industry by 
the simple device of providing each child with a slender 
rod for beating time. It was a stirring sight to see a 
score or more of lively youngsters at a Boston Settle- 
ment House, beating time for dear life, and singing 
away with gusto, if not always with precision. 

It is fairly true that every one who can speak can 
also sing. At least every one ought to be given a 
chance, and the chance is greater, the earlier in life it 



198 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

is given. To sing the major scale, to strike the com- 
mon intervals, to read simple music, and to understand 
at least the rudiments of musical arrangement and 
composition ought to be the common heritage of all 
children. We are not a musical people, in spite 
of our strong admixture of German and Italian blood, 
but we are beginning to render a better account of 
ourselves both at home and in Europe. We have not 
as yet produced any composers of the first rank, but 
we have to our credit some excellent performers, 
and many of the showiest song-birds of grand opera. 
There is good material in our midst, and with even 
elementary training we could in a couple of genera- 
tions become a fairly musical people. We do need, 
however, a distinct and general heightening of our 
standards. Most American women play the piano in a 
meager, bloodless sort of way, and many of them sing 
badly. The difficulty in the majority of cases is lack of 
physique — in some cases, lack of temperament. A man 
often plays the piano better than a woman for the 
simple reason that he has more muscular power, and 
can dominate the instrument. Music only flourishes in 
a musical atmosphere, just as great art requires back 
of it masses of artistic people. In school we can hardly 
hope to produce great musicians, but we can cultivate 
an intelligent appreciation which will make a national 
musical achievement more possible. 

Children ought to be taught to sing as soon as they 
can speak ; and they ought to be taught to use the sing- 
ing voice in all speaking. We need the " Singing 
Man" in fields and mines and factories and stores and 
schoolhouses, — above all, in homes. We need on all 
sides women with sweet, well-modulated voices. Even 



SHARPENING THE TOOL 199 

children need to have their voices gentled. In the daily 
art of life, this is a much more important matter than 
many of the studies to which we now give serious, if not 
successful, attention. If our American voices were more 
musical in both speech and song, we should undoubt- 
edly resent, and finally prohibit, the dreadful noises in 
both town and country which now make civilization 
and pandemonium so nearly synonymous. It is hardly 
to be expected that the older generation will ever do 
much better, — after forty, we do not change easily, — 
but the younger generation can have its interest enlisted 
in a sweeter, clearer, and more musical speech. A daily 
drill in singing and speaking in all our homes and 
schools would add more to the charm of American life 
than a complete and disregarded knowledge of the 
nominative, possessive, and accusative cases. To use the 
voice effectively and agreeably is a practical art well 
worth cultivating, and one may feel genuinely grateful 
to the man or woman or child who in the midst of the 
current stridency soothes the ears and the nerves with 
the rare music of a well-modulated voice. 

A child who sings, and who lives in an atmosphere 
of lovely sound, will naturally crave the greater musical 
range of piano and violin, harp, 'cello, and organ. De- 
lightful as a child's voice is, when well trained, it is of 
course limited to melody and to a somewhat narrow range 
of pitch. If there are children of different ages, or, bet- 
ter still, if all the household sings, it is possible to have 
very delightful part - singing. In addition to its own 
large merit, in and for itself, this sort of music has the 
advantage of being manageable in a variety of pleasant 
places, fields and woods, work-shops and voyagings, as 
well as in well-regulated drawing-rooms. 



200 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

If America would only sing, what a light-hearted, 
really great people we might be! It would not much 
matter then who was President. 

I would always place the greater emphasis upon vo- 
cal music because all can join in ; because it costs noth- 
ing ; because it can be evoked at any time in an}^ 
place, and because it uplifts the heart beyond almost 
anything else there is. Both voice and ear are being 
cultivated, and the organic sense of music deepened. 
But if in addition we could have instrumental music as 
well, we should gain so much in the more intricate har- 
mony, the greater range of pitch, and the immensely 
increased variety. The piano, because of its fixed notes, 
and wide range, and rich possibilities of harmony, is 
probably the best first piece in a family orchestra. But 
it is wholly uncivilized to have the instrument of poor 
quality or out of tune, and even less excusable to have 
it badly played. Most people do play the piano very 
badly, and harm the cause of music by their bad play- 
ing. Frequently the performers have not the sound or- 
ganic equipment to play well. Their anaemia gets into 
their playing. It takes red blood and robust muscles 
and nerves to do the thing well. It is heartrending to 
think of the thousands of women and girls all over 
America who are playing the piano this very minute, 
and doing it so wretchedly that one is tempted, on the 
whole, to class the piano as an instrument of torture. 
But when the piano is good, and it is well played, there 
is no instrument so continuously and permanently satis- 
fying. To play with genuine distinction, a boy must 
begin young, say at eight or ten years, while the organ- 
ism is still plastic and he is forming muscular habits 
and perceptions ; and he must from the start have a 



SHARPENING THE TOOL 201 

competent teacher. It is a fatal mistake to place him 
at the mercy of a poor teacher in the "beginning, with 
the amiable thought in mind that when he really knows 
how to play and can appreciate the privilege (and the 
expense), he shall have a competent master. It is in 
the beginning: that the bov most needs a master. Better 
start out with a master, and if economy require that 
his services be soon dispensed with, the boy can con- 
tinue the work himself, and build upon the initial good 
habits and sound musicianly knowledge that are already 
his. Any teacher in any branch would rather start with 
a boy wholly untaught than with a boy so badly taught 
that much of the precious time must be given to undo- 
ing the harm. There is a certain hopelessness about 
this latter task, for one can never be quite certain that 
the faults and errors have all been uncovered. In music 
it is particularly true that a wrong start is an almost 
fatal handicap. In many localities, it used to be the 
custom, and in some localities it is still the custom, for 
young women, suddenly called upon to make their own 
living, to presume upon very slender musical knowledge, 
and set up as music-teachers. And good-natured neigh- 
bors, with the desire to help, hand over their children. 
But this is unfair both to the children and to the art. 

Few even among educators estimate at its true worth 
the immense organic training involved in the art of 
piano-playing. Quite aside from the value of the music 
and its spiritual enlightenment, a boy gains so much in 
general perception, in actual development of hand and 
eye, in quick muscular response to an intellectual pur- 
pose, that the mastery of the piano is worth while in 
and for itself. It is manual training of the first order, 
in addition to being an art which opens up such a large 



202 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

avenue for self-expression, and supplies one more vital 
interest for the enrichment of daily life. 

Much that I have said in praise of the piano applies 
to the violin, 'cello, and harp, and in smaller measure 
to the more slender instruments of music, the guitar, 
mandolin, flute, cornet, banjo, and zither. Most of them 
have, of course, the limitation of allowing melody only, 
and cannot offer the rich harmonies of the double clef ; 
but each of the more serious instruments, especially the 
violin and 'cello, have beauties of timbre quite their 
own, and all have one large advantage over the piano 
in the matter of portability. 

I have not spoken of the organ, perhaps the most 
majestic of all the instruments of music, because at its 
best it requires such wonderful coordination of hands, 
feet, eyes, and spirit that it ought to come somewhat 
later, after fourteen, and only when the boy has a sound 
foundation of general musical knowledge. Better to 
play the flute or mandolin well than the organ badly. 

It is common knowledge that to gain any degree of 
mastery in handling the violin, 'cello, or harp, one must 
begin not only in boyhood, but in very early boyhood. 
If the art is delayed, it is omitted. It would be difficult 
to exaggerate the value of really knowing how to play 
any one of these splendid instruments. The violin, for 
example, requires a certain initial sensitiveness of or- 
ganization, but it also heightens this sensitiveness, and 
brings out qualities of spirit and body which nothing 
else quite can. The very absence of fixed notes, and 
the consequent possibility of employing the true mu- 
sical scale, both contribute to this result, for the boy is 
thrown back upon himself for the pitch of every note, 
and the value of every interval. Perhaps no other in- 



SHARPENING THE TOOL 203 

strument depends so wholly upon the ear and the hand 
and the spirit of the player. Certainly none other allows 
the musician such opportunities for self-expression, such 
shading of interpretation, such subtle overtones, and 
none compels such complete self-revelation. There are 
moments, when the violinist is lost in his instrument, 
that it seems scarcely decent to listen, for one is regard- 
ing, uninvited, the naked human soul. A boy who plays 
the violin artfully is a different human product, differ- 
ent in both body and spirit from the clumsy lad listen- 
ing, open-mouthed, to the playing, but unable, himself, 
to evoke a note. The player is not only a different 
product, but from our human point of view a much 
more valuable product. 

In this lavish praise of music, the music of both voice 
and stringed instrument, and in this emphatic insist- 
ence that music as an art is an integral and unescapable 
element in all true education, I do not deny that such 
a culture would be quite inimical to our current indus- 
trialism, and to the current irreligion upon which it 
rests. The sensitiveness of spirit and body evoked by 
musical training would find itself out of harmony with 
much that now characterizes our daily life ; the remedy, 
however, is not to avoid the sensitiveness, but rather to 
remove the causes of offense. My own conception of 
education is that its one office is a supreme concern for 
persons. 

^Tasting and smelling are a part of normal daily life, 
and as such are worthy of educational attention. Upon 
taste and smell depends the wholesome gusto with which 
we partake of food and drink. Not only is it a legiti- 
mate pleasure to taste agreeable flavors and to smell 
agreeable odors, but the possession of discriminating 



204 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

taste and smell adds just so much to that sensitiveness 
of the human organism which it is the purpose of edu- 
cation to intensify and enlarge. Flavors and odors are 
notoriously hard to describe, but the attempt to describe 
them is eminently worth while as a pure exercise in 
discrimination, to say nothing of the possible enlarge- 
ment of sense-knowledge. Nearly all children are pas- 
sionately fond of flowers. It would interest them to try 
to define the characteristic odor of each flower ; and 
later, blindfolded, to name the flowers from their odor. 
One could devise many pretty and helpful exercises 
along this line. They need not come often, not more 
than once a week, let us say, or even once a fortnight. 
The point is to call the children's attention to the mat- 
ter, and to cultivate in them the blessed habit of dis- 
crimination. The characteristic odors of plants, of 
woods, of metals, of foods, of common substances gen- 
erally are quite worth knowing. A subtle part of wood- 
craft depends upon a keen sense of smell. Wild animals 
are much keener in this respect than tame ones, and 
both are much ahead of ourselves. It would not be de- 
sirable to exercise children along the line of pathologi- 
cal odors, but when these occur, as they do at any time 
and in the most careful communities, it is the part of 
wisdom to point out their warning significance, and to 
suggest a remedy for the evil. 

In the matter of taste, boys are very explicit. They 
like, or they do not like. They will look forward for 
days to the coming of some favorite dish, and they will 
quite stubbornly refuse to eat things which they fancy 
they do not like. So marked are these preferences and 
dislikes that I have come to believe that the sense of 
taste must be much more acute in boys than in older 



SHARPENING THE TOOL 205 

persons. I would not force children to eat things that 
they actively dislike, but neither would I allow them 
always to have the same things to eat. We have a very 
simple rule with our own boys, — it is to provide a 
wholesome varied table, without alternatives, and to 
allow the boys to eat or not to eat. Unless a boy is 
really ill and requires a special diet, his taste soon 
comes to be reasonably catholic. It would be worth 
while to encourage children to describe tastes, and to 
detect flavors, even to estimate quantitatively the amount 
of lemon juice, or salt, or sugar, in a given quantity of 
water. Here, again, it is not so much the extent of the 
taste discipline, as it is the desirability of further en- 
larging the habit of discrimination. Unless one has 
already made some such experiment, one would be sur- 
prised to see how many persons are quite unable to 
name the flavor of the very food they are at the mo- 
ment eating. Just as we want the perceptive hands and 
eyes and ears, so in subordinate measure we want the 
perceptive nose and tongue. 

This whole question of organic training, of develop- 
ing and sharpening the faculties and so providing the 
spirit with a better tool, deserves a large volume, but 
I am only able to give it a scant chapter. If, however, 
the major point is won, — the immense desirability of 
such sense - training, — then practically the rest fol- 
lows. I would sum up the matter by saying that on 
the whole, it would be better educationally if at four- 
teen a boy had not yet learned to read. The chances 
are that if he had been in good company, animal and 
vegetable as well as human, both the power and the 
habit of observation would be far keener than if he 
had been permitted to know life only at second-hand 



206 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

through books. " As I have already suggested, few- 
bright boys will reach fourteen without teaching them- 
selves to read, and I would not for a moment deny 
them this privilege. When the appetite for such knowl- 
edge comes it is the proper time to satisfy it. But I 
would not allow the newly acquired art to usurp much 
of a boy's time, nor would I encourage him to regard 
it as an accomplishment of any great present impor- 
tance. It would better be taken for granted that of 
course all persons of intelligence learn to read some- 
time, and that reading is a good second-best when first- 
hand thoughts and occupations are not within reach. 
But this very temperate use of books is quite differ- 
ent from making our school discipline wholly or even 
largely literary, and neglecting the real sources of 
human power, the awakened spirit and the trained 
body. As I have been trying to show, these are the 
real matters of educational importance. There is so 
much to be done in unfolding the spirit, and in 
strengthening and perfecting the body that if we 
parents and teachers have any degree p of skill and gift 
of insight, any measure of love and devotion, we shall 
find these first fourteen years all too short for our 
large purposes. If we go about our important business 
with scientific thoroughness, we shall need every minute 
of the time. There will none be left over for those 
formal English branches which now waste the days of 
childhood because they belong rationally to the days 
of youth. I venture to believe, as a result of experi- 
ence, that all the academic knowledge commonly given 
to a boy up to fourteen, could be imparted more easily, 
more thoroughly, and more accurately during the one 
year from fourteen to fifteen. 



SHARPENING THE TOOL 207 

We shall be held to our radical purpose even more 
rigidly if we have the insight to perceive that in the 
great drama of cause and effect, intellectuality itself is 
more surely attained as the by-product of an intense, 
first-hand spiritual and bodily life, than as the direct 
product of scholastic effort. I cannot too deeply empha- 
size this vital and revolutionary truth. It has, I think, 
ail the importance of a discovery, and it is illustrated 
in the biography of nearly all our great men and women. 
I would urge the reader to select for himself one hundred 
eminent persons, and look into the ascertainable source 
of their distinction. He will not find it in the current 
school discipline, — some have had it, many have not. 
He will find it in the strength of the spirit, and in the 
health and efficiency of the body. 

And now, looking at the matter from the school- 
master's point of view, I would suggest that merely as 
material for the succeeding high-school process, boys 
trained in the manner just indicated, trained in spirit, 
in body and in human faculty, would have far greater 
power, and be in every way distinctly more promising 
than the customary material which now offers itself, — 
or to be more accurate, is sacrificially offered. Place 
the two products side by side, give them the same intel- 
lectual tasks for three or four years in the well-known 
process of preparing for the college entrance examina- 
tions, and the boy who is spiritually and organically 
trained, who is sound in spirit and in body, will come 
out ahead every time. 

But there is another test. Any rational scheme of 
education, no matter when interrupted, must justify 
itself as the very best scheme that, up to that moment, 
could possibly have been offered. I make this state- 



208 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

ment in spite of the fact that many professed educators 
deliberately offer different courses during the high- 
school period, — one for boys who can go to college 
and will ; the other for boys who cannot go to college 
or won't. This reasoning has always seemed to me un- 
sound. The question of going to college ought not to be 
closed at fourteen. Many boys do not know until the 
time comes whether they can go to college, or even 
whether they care to. But the fundamental objection 
to this separation of adolescents into sheep and goats is 
that it ought to be our earnest concern to give them 
all, every one of them, the best and soundest education 
we can while they are with us, quite regardless of the 
hazard of future study. If the courses leading to col- 
lege have the high disciplinary value which the college 
authorities maintain that they have, then quite clearly 
the boy who may not have the advantage of college 
needs such courses even more than the intended col- 
legian. And it is just as clear that if the required 
courses fail to prepare a boy for life outside the col- 
lege, then the requirements ought to be changed until 
they do. There are grave objections against any such 
separation, and I do not know of a single logical argu- 
ment in its favor. Better far the policy of giving every 
boy an equal chance, and making the chance the largest 
possible. 

In America our schemes of education are constantly 
being interrupted, and will continue to be interrupted 
as long as we prefer the romance of fortune's wheel to 
the orderliness of a purposeful industry. Accepting for 
the moment the disorder of our present industrial life, 
let us ask, as practical persons, what will be the situa- 
tion of a boy who comes to fourteen under our rational 



SHARPENING THE TOOL 209 

education of spirit and body, and then through some 
parental inability or blunder, suddenly finds himself 
obliged to go to work instead of going on to the high 
school and college. This is a somewhat severe test, but a 
perfectly fair one. No scheme of education is defensible 
which may leave a boy stranded at any stage of his 
career. And I answer unhesitatingly that a boy so 
trained will still have an immense advantage over his 
scholastic rival, for of the two, he is the one who is 
really educated. He has the stronger motive power and 
the better tool. He will be more resourceful, more in- 
teresting, more alive. He will have greater human 
charm, greater health, greater skill. What he does 
know will be at first hand and of proven everyday 
worth, — it will have the great advantage of being so. 
His store of knowledge may be slender, but it will be 
wrapped up in his very fiber, the result of his own per- 
sonal experience, and therefore a permanent possession. 
He need not waste the golden hours in constant review- 
ing, for knowledge of this sort will not slip easily away. 
It is the old contrast between power and unorganized 
fact. In life it is the power which always wins. 

Although I was myself brought up in the camp of 
the scientists, and know something of the delight of 
scientific knowledge I have come to believe that all 
formal knowledge — language and mathematics as well 
as natural science — is a large obstacle to true educa- 
tion when it is introduced too early in childhood or 
pursued too exclusively in youth. For knowledge of this 
sort is necessarily analytic and static; it is gained by 
regarding its object from many different view-points, 
but always from the outside. It is unavoidably a knowl- 
edge about things. And when such knowledge, in or- 



210 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

der to become articulate and communicable, incarnates 
itself in language, it is forced to use such vocabulary 
as it finds at hand, and to express itself in ready-made 
and ill-fitting concepts. Knowledge is essentially expla- 
nation. Its process and its boast is to explain the un- 
known in terms of the known. But this is only possible 
if we posit a universe in which all is given, and the only 
conceivable novelty is some new arrangement of old 
elements. Such a process is in grievous conflict with that 
vital view of life in which existence is itself creation, 
and each arriving moment is large with possible nov- 
elty. In formal knowledge we may be said to explain all 
that does not need explaining, and to have no words, 
no concepts in which to express that unique element in 
the occurrence which gave it significance and value. In 
saying all this, one says nothing against the utility and 
desirableness of such knowledge in our daily life of 
action and effort. But to be of educational value, it 
must be introduced in its proper place and at the right 
age ; that is to say, when a boy is mature enough to 
understand its limitations as well as its utility and can 
realize that in science he is dealing with symbols and 
representations, with cross sections of reality, and not 
for a moment with the whole of existence and thought. 

It is also worth remarking that in attempting to share 
this large body of formal knowledge with our children 
we are hampered not only by the confusion of approx- 
imate language and concepts, but still more by the dis- 
abling fact that the children themselves do not clearly 
understand either language or concept, and attach a 
partial or absolutely erroneous meaning to both. 

It seems to me much more reasonable to preserve 
children, at least up to fourteen, from this premature 



SHARPENING THE TOOL 211 

intellection, and to occupy them almost wholly with the 
realities of experience. It is better for them to know 
things than to know about things. It is better for them 
to enter unreservedly into life, and identify themselves 
with events, than to stand aside and analyze. Just as 
in language study, we often make the mistake of offer- 
ing grammar before the children have an adequate 
stock of words for the grammar to operate upon, so in 
much of our formal study of all sorts, we ask children 
to analyze life, to create symbols of reality, to employ 
alien concepts before they sufficiently know the reality 
of life itself. The richer harvest for them, as for us, is 
through participation, through identification, to gain 
that intuitive, absolute knowledge by which alone one 
comes to know reality. In such a process we involve 
most of the spiritual qualities which have earlier seemed 
to us worthy of cultivation, and notably unconscious- 
ness of self. To know life by identification with life, is 
to lose the separate, partial self and to enter upon the 
path of salvation. The knower and the knowledge are 
again identical, and we stand once more at the very 
heart of things. 



X 

THE AWKWARD AGE 

A wholesome boy, at fourteen, is a very attractive 
creature. For a boy, it seems to me the perfect age. 
He has still the endearing charms of childhood, and he 
has, in addition, the larger intellectual curiosity, and 
the touches of maturity which make him an excellent 
comrade. With the passing of the months, he ought to 
be no less attractive, for in reality his companionable- 
ness is constantly increasing ; but it must be confessed 
that under our current systems of education his per- 
sonal charm is apt to diminish. He naturally loses the 
childish dependence and chubbiness which make so 
strong an appeal to the father-and-mother instinct in 
all of us. We must put up with this, just as we must 
put up with that gray day when our lad doffs his 
knickerbockers and dons long trousers, serving unmis- 
takable notice upon an older generation that it is less 
and less needed, and must soon face the competition of 
younger blood. But there are other and less desirable 
changes which pile up after the fourteenth birthday 
for which we elders are responsible, and which we may 
not so assuredly cast on the broad shoulders of Nature. 

Along with the increased maturity come an increase 
in self-consciousness — making it an awkward age — 
and a loss of disinterestedness, making it a selfish age. 
And there are manifest physical changes. The chubbi- 
ness which was so attractive in the small boy is far 
from attractive in the older lad, for it suggests over- 



THE AWKWARD AGE 213 

feeding and bodily laziness. The ideal for the adolescent 
age is not chubbiness, but a clear-cut muscular lean- 
ness, suggestive of the thoroughbred. When our grow- 
ing lad is developing wholesomely, one can detect these 
changes of contour almost from day to day. The soft, 
flower-like face of the boy is melting into the more 
finely chiseled face of the lad ; and his cherub-body is 
giving place to the lean, muscular body of the youth- 
ful athlete. Where the spiritual life has been keen, and 
the bodily discipline at its best, both changes should 
be in the direction of greater beauty. The lean, eager 
face of the lad of sixteen and his well-developed mus- 
cular body ought to manifest the loveliness of which 
the beautiful child gave such abundant promise. But 
commonly this is not the result. The rare cases in which 
Cupid unfolds into Adonis proclaim the possibilities, 
but as a rule, our lad is less lovely than the lost child 
whom he succeeds, and whom we unavoidably mourn. 
A man ought to grow in beauty up to forty or even 
fifty, and even then the graciousness and wisdom and 
dignity which have been the slow harvest of the long 
years ought to suffice to m^ike him more godlike, rather 
than less godlike. He begins Hfeas Cupid ; he ought to 
end it as Jove. 

This period from fourteen to eighteen, this awkward 
age, by common consent, is, from the point of view of 
the boy himself, marked by very real difficulties. Some 
of these are essential and perhaps unescapable, since 
they are the accompaniment of the radical changes tak- 
ing place in his own bodily organism, the subtle tumult 
of adolescence. They may not, I think, be entirely got 
rid of, but they may certainly be so far minimized as to 
be robbed of their powers of shipwreck. It is our cus- 



214 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

torn to desert the boy when he most needs our help, to 
proceed quite as if this tumult were not on his hands, 
and to attack the boy problem by stupidly ignoring a 
vital part of it. This educational unreason is due partly 
to the vulgarity of our men teachers, who have come to 
the incredible conclusion that because the sex question 
is delicate, any mention of it is immodest, even morally 
reprehensible ; and partly to the unfortunate and emas- 
culating prevalence of women teachers in our public 
education. Men teachers for boys, and women teachers 
for girls, with both men and women sound, virile, in- 
structed, and unashamed, and the difficulties of the 
awkward age, due to adolescence, would at least be in 
the way of being solved. 

But there are other difficulties connected with this 
period which have a social rather than a physical basis, 
and which are more readily within our power to mend. 
Our greatest stupidity, it seems to me, is that we 
parents and teachers profess to love children, and yet 
deliberately and prematurely we proceed to get rid of 
them just as soon as possible by thrusting upon them 
the standards, decisions, and responsibilities of adult 
life. As the cup-bearers of civilization we elders ought 
not to ask our boys to be prematurely men. We ought 
to hold them back rather than press them forward, so 
that when in the fullness of time their hour really 
strikes, they shall have been nourished upon an ample 
childhood, and shall in the end attain a more opulent 
manhood than we ourselves have been able to attain. 
The American high-school is open to serious criticism, 
but none more serious than this, that it is a premature 
destroyer of childhood. Some, of course, by the grace 
of God, and unusually intelligent parents, do escape; 



THE AWKWARD AGE 215 

but the typical product is not a larger and more attrac- 
tive boy, to whom has been added the gift of a sound 
scholarship. The typical product — I meet many of 
them — is a crude, over-conscious young person who is 
neither boy nor man, and whose scholarship, to say the 
least, is uncertain. During the four years at the high 
school, the average boy almost invariably loses his sim- 
plicity and disinterestedness, along with much of the 
physical charm of boyhood ; and he gains self -conscious- 
ness and calculation, as well as a regrettable selfishness 
and unmannerliness. We acknowledge the evil, those 
of us who look at society with open eyes, and we stifle 
our doubts by the fond delusion that though these boys 
lack personal charm and breeding, they are neverthe- 
less being educated, and we must meanwhile be patient. 
But if our fundamental definition of education is the 
right one, that education means an increase in human 
wealth, a deepening in human quality, a growth in hu- 
man charm and loveliness ; if it means a spiritual rev- 
elation, the unfolding and perfecting of the human 
spirit, — then by all the evidence, these boys are not 
being educated, they are being debauched, for they are 
being made less original, less lovable, less sound. If we 
turn aside for the moment from this deeper, religious 
meaning of education, and apply only the test of formal 
scholarship, the showing is no better. I do not speak 
unadvisedly or hurriedly. One very real test of scholar- 
ship is momentum. The natural sequel to the high school 
is the university. If our high schools really made for 
scholarship, the majority of the graduates would turn 
to the university as a matter of course. As it is, per- 
haps half drop out before graduation, and of those who 
do graduate, a very small per cent go on to the univer- 



216 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

sity, some of tliem gladly and voluntarily, some of them 
under compulsion, perhaps for no better reason than 
that socially it is the thing to do. Some of the boys are 
compelled, for economic reasons, to go immediately to 
work, but applying the same test of momentum, how 
many of the non-collegians enlarge their scanty scholar- 
ship in after life, or even retain their initial penny- 
worth ? The plain truth is that the American high 
school does not make for sound scholarship. Taking all 
the states, and estimating the high schools, not by their 
pretensions, but by their actual performances, and it 
will be found that they fail even in that formal educa- 
tion to which they avowedly address themselves. 

American boys have, among American adults, at any 
rate, a great reputation for cleverness ; why, then, 
should they in all sound scholarship fall so markedly 
behind many of their European brothers ? The answer 
seems to me transparently clear. Education in all its 
phases is a matter of the spirit and the body. When 
these are not engaged, education is at a stand-still. In 
our American high school, spirit and body are not en- 
gaged in education, for the simple reason that they are 
engaged elsewhere. Life in a typical high school is a 
life of distractions, — the more progressive and up-to- 
date the high school, the greater the number of dis- 
tractions. The spirit is engaged in class organization, 
class politics, school journalism, secret societies, lunch 
clubs, debating clubs, photographic circles, trading op- 
erations, stamp collecting, social ambitions, incipient 
flirtations. And the body is engaged, not in the culti- 
vation of grace and health and accomplishment, but 
with the furtherance of the most senseless competitive 
athletics that the arch-enemy of human excellence could 



THE AWKWARD AGE 217 

well devise. To say that our current interscholastic ath- 
letics makes for manliness and genuine physical prow- 
ess is simply to be disingenuous. The boys who least 
need the exercise take the most prominent part. The 
boys who most need it take no part whatever, except 
to shout themselves hoarse with a real or feigned 
enthusiasm. And so little is the furtherance of health 
an object that, as we all know, the boy who enters an 
event must win it at any cost, — for the honor of the 
school. Our current athletics is physical culture re- 
versed. 

Keal distinction in high-school life is not the reward 
of scholarship. It is the reward of successful competi- 
tive athletics or successful class lobbying. The school 
hero — the boy who does most for his school — is the 
boy who works in almost any direction whatever, ex- 
cept in the direction of the one goal which the school 
is supposed to aim at — scholarship. My own funda- 
mental criticism of the American high school is that it 
does not apprehend the deep religious and economic 
meaning of education, or the efficient approach to intel- 
lectuality through spirit and body ; and my secondary 
criticism is, that even granting its professed goal, for- 
mal knowledge, it does not arrive. What it does attain 
is adolescent distraction, some of it innocent, some of 
it futile, some of it even pernicious. But adolescent 
distraction, whether innocent, or futile, or pernicious, is 
not education. My own conception of the high school 
is a very sober one. I phrase it to myself as the process 
of youth. The fundamental test is human, — how has 
it all affected the boy as a human being ? What changes 
are taking place in his spirit and his body ? What 
equipment is being added to his mind? Is he moving 



218 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

from a smaller into a larger human world ? It is in such 
terms as these that every civilization must ultimately 
express itself — in terms of persons, in terms of human 
charm and accomplishment and power, not in terms of 
commercial or material magnitudes. It is common to 
believe that our monster steamships are great achieve- 
ments. So they are, — they displace fifty thousand tons 
of clean salt water ; but whether they do this in the 
service of God or the Devil does not depend upon their 
bigness, but wholly upon the people who occupy their 
bigness. They are the symbols of achievement and civ- 
ilization only if the people they carry are persons of 
charm and accomplishment and spiritual power, bent 
upon worthy errands, and not wretched pygmies run- 
ning hither and thither for the simple and deplorable 
reason that they have nothing of moment to do any- 
where. Our educational ideals are naturally and prop- 
erly the expression of our social ideals, and we have 
gone pretty far astray when we allow these ideals to 
shift from persons to things. 

The high school covers four years ; in some private 
institutions, five years. It would better be limited to 
three, and might, very easily, if those adolescent dis- 
tractions of which I have been speaking with such grave 
disparagement, were wisely and resolutely eliminated. 
If we conceive of the function of the high school as 
primarily to get a boy ready for college, it can be ful- 
filled with wholesome leisure in three years. I have 
known it to be well done in one year. My own prepa- 
ration occupied five months, and I was not a clever boy, 
either, but I was interested. I had not been to school 
more than a year and a half in all my life, and the 
juice had not been squeezed out of the process. Also it 



THE AWKWARD AGE 219 

was easier to enter college then than now, and easier to 
enter for science than the arts. 

But in a wiser age we will hold a broader view of 
the function of the high school. We will repudiate all 
preparatory schools. We will not get ready for any- 
thing, not even for death. We will live cleanly and 
reverently in the present moment, and in doing this we 
will be prepared for all things. I am not, then, inter- 
ested to present the high school as a preparatory school. 
I am only interested in it as the suitable process of late 
boyhood and early youth. In my own thought, it covers 
three years, from fourteen to seventeen, years not so 
pregnant as those wonderful years of grace up to four- 
teen, but nevertheless very precious as the fitting time 
to heighten and make permanent the spiritual and- bod- 
ily achievements of boyhood, and to add to these the 
elements of a sound formal knowledge, — to add to 
them, mark you, not to substitute for them. It is a sea- 
son for conservation, as well as for acquisition. In truth, 
if I were forced to choose between conservation of spirit 
and body, and acquisition of a formal sort, as so many 
high-school teachers bent upon preparatory work seem 
to feel that they must, I would reach a different deci- 
sion from theirs, — I would unhesitatingly choose con- 
servation, and trust the acquisition to the growing 
intellectual curiosity of youth. 

Education is really a very leisurely art, and is prone 
to hide her face in the presence of too much confusion 
and bustle. Boys, as well as grown-up persons, must 
have leisure to invite the soul. The studies to be taken 
up during these three years of early adolescence ought 
to be determined solely by what we believe, upon ma- 
ture and deliberate reflection, a wholesome lad of seven- 



220 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

teen ought to possess in the way of formal knowledge 
and formal intellectual training. This seems to me here, 
as earlier, the one infallible method. It is only when we 
know precisely what we want that we can entertain any 
great hope of getting it. " The world turns aside to let 
any man pass who knows whither he is going." 

I will, then, set down in formal order, the studies in 
which I believe a lad of seventeen ought to be well 
grounded, and I will ask as careful attention to the 
omissions as to the inclusions. I am naming the studies 
in what seems to me the order of their importance : — 

1. English, including a careful drill in Latin and Greek 
roots, in composition, in legible penmanship, and in the 
most exacting elocution. 

2. -Literature and history, given wholly as abundant read- 
ing courses, and never as recitations. 

3. Mathematics, covering non-commercial arithmetic, ele- 
mentary algebra, and plane geometry. 

4. Science, taking in botany, zoology, and practical hygiene. 

5. French, during all three years. 

6. German, elementary, and preferably during the third 
year. 

I should regard a lad as well educated if at seven- 
teen he had conserved the spiritual and bodily charms 
of his early boyhood, and had added to them a sound 
quantitative knowledge in these five departments of 
study, and in the sixth, a liberal idea of history as lit- 
erature, and of literature as a rich source of intellec- 
tual pleasure and enlightenment, I will not defend my 
choice. It is open to any man or woman to make out a 
rival list. If it is better than mine, I will appropriate 
it so quickly that they will have difficulty in establish- 
ing priority! But I will gladly explain my choice of 



THE AWKWARD AGE 221 

studies, and be as specific as an admitted advocate, so 
that at least we may not disagree through lack of un- 
derstanding. I may say, in general, of all the studies, 
that I have included none for any supposed industrial 
value ; none for any supposed past or future utility, 
and none certainly as preparatory to anything under 
the sun. My one criterion has been immediacy. So far 
as I know what immediacy is, I have chosen only those 
studies which have an unquestionable contemporary 
value. Out of the long list of possible studies, these 
seem to me the best qualified to make our lad a more 
complete and lovable human being. I do not want to 
make him a docile citizen, or a smug shopkeeper, or an 
incipient artisan, or a walking encyclopaedia, or an ex- 
pert linguist, or, for that matter, any other special 
creature. I insist quite frankly upon the higher claims 
of human graciousness and charm. If our three-year 
high-school course make the lad more interesting, more 
lovable, more resourceful, more of a person (as our 
expressive phrase has it), then the process is commend- 
able education. If it fails to do this, then it is an ad- 
mitted futility. If the process does the reverse of this, 
if it turns out a boy less human and lovable and com- 
petent at the end than in the beginning, then mani- 
festly the high-school is a plain malevolence. I would 
ask every student of education to apply some such 
practical human measure to the high-school boys and 
girls whom he meets in the school, on the street, in 
public conveyances, at the theater, in the shops, at 
home. 

One may not, of course, admit the validity of this 
test of immediacy ; and in that case there is nothing 
to be gained by argument. The difference is funda- 



222 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

mental, and we stand at the parting of the ways. Some 
of my friends are more hopeful than I, and under the 
spell of what they are pleased to call ultimacy, — an 
agreeable antithesis to my own immediacy, — are 
disposed to put up with impertinent and unlovely 
youth far more cheerfully than I do, in the expecta- 
tion that out of it will spring in the end something 
quite satisfactory and beautiful. I appreciate their op- 
timism, and disbelieve in it, — what ye sow, ye reap. 
But I may add parenthetically that in all times and 
places, I repudiate with vehemence that shallow blas- 
phemous contention that we must educate our boys for 
the world as it is, not for the world as it ought to be, * 
for the world is what we to-day make it, and the lazy 
device of throwing upon providence, or God, or des- 
tiny, or fate, or any of the unseen powers of the air, 
the responsibility for all the sacrilege and brutality in 
our current social and industrial life is the last resort 
of craven and lost souls. 

If immediacy be granted as the proper test of educa- 
tion in all its processes, there still remains open a large 
field for profitable discussion as to how this immediacy 
may best be attained. This is the present issue, and 
its high importance makes it imperative that it shall be 
kept clear and incisive. Let us then weigh the imme- 
diate human value of those studies which I have se- 
lected and enumerated. 

And first, as to English. 

I place English at the head of the list for the simple 
reason that the main intercourse of daily life depends 
upon the spoken and the written word, and that our 
own vernacular happens to be English. Command of 
English is then of the very first importance in the in- 



THE AWKWARD AGE 223 

terchange of thought. Less than the Latin races, yet 
still to some slight extent, we express nuances of mean- 
ing by shrugs of the shoulders, by lifting the eyebrows, 
by gestures with the hands, and by other significant 
movements of the body ; but the main carriage for our 
Anglo-Saxon thought is the word. To have the word 
selected with discrimination, to have it so placed with 
respect to other words as to make the meaning of the 
whole transparent and unequivocal, to have it all 
spoken in an agreeable, easily audible voice, or written 
in a clear, legible hand, or printed in well-proportioned 
type is certainly the least that one need ask of any 
person supposed to be educated. And yet from the 
majority of persons we get very much less. To mean 
what you say is accounted a mere commonplace in 
minor morals, and most honest persons fancy that they 
satisfy it. But the better statement of the same in- 
junction — to say what you mean — is seldom insisted 
upon and seldom attained. I do not here refer to the 
accepted conventions and hypocrisies of our social and 
business life, in which we deliberately say anything 
but what we mean. I refer to the honest efforts of the 
average man to express himself in speech. We may 
grant that actions speak louder than words, and yet 
regret the fact. There is surely some grave defect in 
our current education when a nice discrimination in 
the use of words, our own mother tongue, mind you, 
is a rarity even in literature and journalism, and a 
subtlety too great to be looked for on the streets. We 
elders have fallen into the habit of guessing at the 
meaning of those who try to communicate with us, and 
in time get to be quite expert. "From what the 
gentleman says, I infer that he means so and so " — 



224 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

does not signify that the commentator is either dull or 
trying to be funny. It signifies too often that he is 
literally and frankly puzzled to know what the gen- 
tleman does mean, and so hazards what seems to him 
the most rational guess. It is significant to watch 
an honest, persistent child fairly badger some fuzzy 
grown-up in the attempt to get a possible meaning in 
all the articulate noise. A clever child soon learns that 
his badgering is not always welcome, that the grown- 
up, under cross-fire, grows a bit irritable, and so, to 
avoid this untoward result, the child also takes to 
guessing. Later, if you question him, you will find that 
frequently he guesses wrong. Part of this confusion is 
due, of course, to the child's inexperience, but part of 
it, perhaps indeed the greater part, is due to the clumsy 
misuse of words on the part of the grown-up. 

The choice of the right word is the first and most 
important art in formal education, and until we, as a 
people, have mastered it, it seems to me a large foolish- 
ness to enlarge our curriculum elsewhere. Our failure 
in the choice of the right word is reflected in the cur- 
rent use of slang. The major objection to slang is not 
that it is inelegant, — that is a sound minor objection 
— but that it still further confirms us in our sins. It 
encourages us to make a verbal noise instead of express- 
ing a thought. I recall an acquaintance of my boyhood, 
a man notoriously inaccurate and ineffectual in all the 
real issues of life, who used on all occasions to say to 
me, " Don't let them come the giraffe over you, my Boy." 
I suppose that this strange combination of words had 
originally some meaning, but it was either lost in 
transit, or grown too variable to convey any definite 
thought. 



THE AWKWARD AGE 225 

American boys affect a marked carelessness of speech. 
They prefer to throw out uncouth fragments, interjec- 
tions, current phrases, and let you guess their meaning, j 
In some cases this is difficult, because there is no 
meaning, — it was a mere noise, a conversational pad- 
ding. And this evil tradition is carried forward into 
adult life and permeates the conversational habits of 
both men and women. The probable explanation is that 
boys confound accuracy with priggishness. They fancy 
that correct speech must be academic speech. Nothing 
could be further from the truth. We have splendid 
idiom, vigorous Anglo-Saxon in which the most out- 
right boy or man can say precisely what he means, and 
without recourse to foreign derivatives or classroom 
English. In point of fact this idiomatic, Anglo-Saxon 
speech is the very best we have, and is the habitual 
speech of the masters. But so long as our boys and 
men obscure their own meaning, partly through sheer 
ignorance and fuzzy thinking, partly through deliberate 
intention, we may hardly account ourselves an educated 
people. 

Good English means not only the choice of the right 
word (I prefer this to the current expression, the right 
choice ofivords), but also by necessity such placing of 
the words as will make the meaning — your meaning, 
bear in mind — clear and unequivocal. To choose the 
right word, and to say the wrong thing about it, would 
be no less a tragedy. As we all know, it is easily pos- 
sible to take a given sentence, and by a very slight 
change in the order of the words, to alter the emphasis 
completely, or even to give the sentence an entirely dif- 
ferent meaning. It is not too much to ask that our 
wholesome lad, before he can be considered educated, 



226 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

shall have acquired the ability to say what he means, 
and shall have established the habit of doing so. 

Nor is it too much to ask that he shall invariably say 
what he means with that literary effectiveness which 
we name style. I use the word " invariably " with in- 
tention, because it is a fatal mistake to believe that he 
can omit style from his table-talk at breakfast, and 
fetch it back successfully at dinner, or dispense with it 
in his home letters and daily intercourse, and bring it 
out, at will, when he comes to write a theme. Style is 
not a superficial thing with which to adorn our good, 
plain, everyday English. It is not an embroidery, a 
decoration, to be put on or omitted according to the 
importance of the occasion. On the contrary, style is 
an integral part of the thought, and is sound and good 
only when the thought is sound and good. Slovenly 
English is not merely the forgivable carelessness in 
f expression of an otherwise good fellow, — it is the cer- 
tain sign of slovenly thinking. We have, of course, our 
professed stylists who would deny all this. When the 
occasion seems to them worth it, they fetch out their 
jeweled words and string them together with what they 
imagine to be literary effectiveness. Some of them write 
books, and some of them write for the magazines, and 
some of them turn off little things in verse. It is " fine 
writing," but no educated person ever mistook that for 
style. Like breeding, literary style is a part of the very 
fabric of life, and only to be won by years of faithful 
devotion to the things of the spirit. Style is not com- 
municable. Each lad must win it for himself, and he 
must win it first of all by having something to say. 

" People think that I can teach them style," said 
Matthew Arnold. " What stuff it all is ! Have some- 



THE AWKWARD AGE 227 

thing to say, and say it as clearly as you can. That is 
the only secret of style." 

We read in literary biographies of men who spent 
years in the quest of style. Some of them never found 
it, and remained imitators, second and third and fourth 
rate men, to the very end. Those who really gained the 
quest won by finding themselves, by organizing their 
thought, by working out some philosophy of art or life 
sufficiently novel and valuable to be worth communi- 
cating to their fellows. When they had that, they had 
style, and the quest was theirs. It is a paradox, but 
true, that the best way to cultivate literary style is to 
disregard literary style, and to attend with knightly 
devotion to the quality of one's thought. And so we 
come back to our starting-point : good English is not 
the product of analysis and drill, — it is the product of 
character, a child of that rich human spirit which hav- 
ing something to say, finds quite naturally a worthy 
mode of expression. The English which is to-day charm- 
ing the ears of Great Britain and America is not the 
work of stylists. It is the speech of men who have had 
the industry to think, and the stout heart to think 
originally and worthily. 

The failure of the American high school to commu- 
nicate good English is a spiritual failure. The school 
has ignored the source of all vital language, — the life 
of the spirit. In sheer cowardice, it has fought shy of 
religion and taught copy-book platitudes. In the desire 
to offend no one, however belated, it has turned away 
from constructive economics, arid attempted to work 
oat a scheme of daily life, with bread-and-butter calmly 
taken for granted. How can Education rear any com- 
mendable superstructure, if she stubbornly refuses to 



228 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

build upon the only possible foundations ? How can she 
unfold and perfect the human spirit if she will have 
nothing to do with the spirit? How can she further 
that sound intellectuality which is the joint product of 
the spiritual and bodily life, if in her vulgar, prudish 
conception of modesty, she is shamed at the sight of a 
naked boy, and in her fear of offending some dishonest 
pocket-book, hesitates to ask how the children are to be 
decently fed and clothed and housed ? Our failure in 
America to use good English, to speak and write our 
beautiful mother tongue with accuracy and distinction, 
is the sign and symbol of our poverty as persons. It 
is a very grave failure, very significant, for it is a fail- 
ure of the spirit. 

But a wholesome lad at seventeen ought to do more 
than possess an admirable English style, great and un- 
usual as that accomplishment in America is. He can 
only communicate his excellent English by speaking or 
writing. It is not too much to ask that when he speaks 
to you, he shall hold up his head, turn his face towards 
you, enunciate clearly and so pitch his voice that you 
will like to listen. But it is vastly more than one com- 
monly gets from either boys or men. As a rule, they 
look anywhere but at you, they mumble and mutter, 
talk through their noses, mis-pronounce their words, 
and pitch their voices either to an inaudible gurgle or 
an excited scream. I am not speaking here of the so- 
called illiterate classes, but of those who have had the 
advantages of the schools, sometimes for ten or a dozen 
years, and have failed to acquire these simple funda- 
mentals of English culture. 

Nor is it too much to ask that when this wholesome 
lad at seventeen writes you a letter, he shall send some- 



THE AWKWARD AGE 229 

thing at once legible and well-spaced and attractive- 
looking. A man is fortunate if with a large correspond- 
ence, the postman bring him one such letter a day. 

And so, being a very practical person, and believing 
in cause and effect, I include both elocution and pen- 
manship in the English work of a rational high school 
and regard them both as of large importance. 

The old-time elocution of the platform orator and 
the stump-speaker, with its unnatural cadences and 
pump-handle gesticulations, has very properly fallen 
into disrepute. But there is another form of elocution, 
the voice culture of the well-bred, which deserves high 
place in the curriculum of every school. It is a very 
partial sort of education which does not teach a boy 
to speak distinctly and agreeably. The effectiveness of 
what he says depends upon the manner as well as the 
matter, and I question whether ultimately the one does 
not react upon the other. Skill in conversation is more 
important than in public speaking because it represents 
the major part of our social intercourse; but the ability 
to speak acceptably in public, and the self -poise which 
enables a man to do it naturally and imperturbably 
are an essential part of his moral equipment. These 
qualities are particularly needed in a republic. To 
keep silent in a public meeting when things are going 
the wrong way, and we know that they are going the 
wrong way, is sheer cowardice. The wise man who is 
too shy, or too feeble-voiced, or too anything else, to 
make his wisdom heard, might, from the social point 
of view, just as well be a fool. There is wisdom in a 
multitude of counselors, but if, as recently hinted, it 
is generally in only one or two of them, and if these 
have not the courage to speak up, they might as well 



230 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

all be demagogues. To have the knees take to shaking, 
and tell-tale beads of perspiration appear on the fore- 
head, and the usually fluent tongue begin to stammer 
just because a man is asked to speak to a company of 
his fellows, is a common enough experience, but it is far 
from admirable. It is the mark of a deplorable self- 
consciousness, the frank avowal that the man has never, 
in any thoroughgoing sense of the word, been educated. 
An educated lad, at seventeen, must be able to speak in 
private and in public with clearness and distinction, 
and he must show here as elsewhere a fine unconscious- 
ness of that tiny particle, himself. On the principle, I 
suppose, that people who live in glass houses must not 
throw stones, we are prone to make all sorts of excuses 
for shyness and self-consciousness and the whole miser- 
able category of shrinkings and shirkings and the dis- 
loyalties of silence. In reality we ought to scourge this 
sort of misdemeanor through the streets as the evidence 
of a culprit egotism. Whatever his other accomplish- 
ments, a shy man is still an uneducated man, for clearly 
he is not master of himself. 

Our high-school penmanship, in spite of its occasional 
legibility, is not a thing to wax enthusiastic over. It 
carries the trademark of its own special brand of copy- 
book, — Spencerian, or vertical, or whatever it may be. 
The uniformity is tiresome. But the major objection is 
that the feebleness and faltering in the lines show un- 
mistakably that they are not the result of free nat- 
ural movements of the hand and forearm, but are the 
poor, cramped results of classroom imitation. Those 
who have given ten minutes of real study to the subject 
of handwriting soon learn that there is no such thing 
c as uniformity in rational penmanship. On the contrary, 



THE AWKWARD AGE 231 

a man's handwriting is as characteristic and organic as 
any other movement of his body. It depends upon the 
relative size of the bones in the hand and the arm, upon 
the condition of the muscles and nerves, and finally 
upon the development of the corresponding brain cen- 
ters. The only rational handwriting is individual, and 
the only rational system of instruction accepts these 
individual results, and encourages a boy to work over 
each of the fifty-two letters of the written alphabet, and 
each of the ten figures of our decimal system, and each 
of the characters of the Roman notation, until he has 
attained speed and certainty in the making, and in the 
result both legibility and grace. 

There are, of course, certain obvious suggestions that 
may profitably be given to every boy. One of these is 
that so far as practicable it is wise to form each word 
without lifting pen from paper, so as to produce a unit 
impression upon the eye, and that the space so saved 
may advantageously be distributed between the words 
themselves. In this way we gain the greatest legibility 
in the least space. It is manifestly unintelligent to 
sprawl the letters or even the syllables of a word far 
apart, and then to economize space by running the 
words together. In many editorial offices, rolled manu- 
scripts are not even examined, — they are thrown at 
once into the waste-paper basket. It is quite as justifi- 
able to give over a correspondent who insists upon any 
laziness or mannerism which tends to make his letters 
a thing to be dreaded, rather than to be welcomed. 

I would remark in passing that it is a good habit 
to dot one's Vs and cross one's fs. The object of both 
speaking and writing being to communicate thought, it 
is only reasonable to do it with the least possible friction. 



232 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

Any unnecessary obstacle is to be deplored. If a boy 
once gets this cardinal principle well fixed in his mind 
he will not only eagerly accept your own suggestions, 
but he will extend them, and work out additional ones 
for himself. Our daily life is characterized by an im- 
mense amount of unreason in matters both large and 
small, but the majority of human beings really wish to 
be reasonable, and need only an aroused attention and 
the help of friendly suggestion. In the matter of hand- 
writing, a careful teacher will commend to his boys all 
the conventions which are founded upon reason and 
taste, such as the habitual use of white paper, the choice 
of very black ink, the allowance of sufficient margin on 
all four sides of the page to obviate any possible cramp- 
ing of the handwriting, the proper spacing of the address 
on the envelope, and the attainment of a distinctness 
and fullness of address calculated to carry the letter to 
its desired destination. Nor will he omit such small mat- 
ters as the accepted conventions in beginning and end- 
ing a letter, and the best forms of address. A boy who 
begins his letter to a friend or relative, " Dear Sir," is 
manifestly in need of further instruction. Matters set 
forth in black and white are proverbially cold, — it is a 
safe rule to make one's letters as friendly and cordial 
as circumstances allow. They may warm the heart with- 
out being either forward or over-intimate. These are all 
small matters, and when over-emphasized, as in some of 
our so-called finishing-schools, may easily become ab- 
surd; but treated as small matters they are quite worth 
idealizing, for they add a certain touch to human inter- 
course. Letters at best are dangerous things, for they 
so completely reveal the inner life. To those who care 
to read between the lines, or by reason of instinct do it 



THE AWKWARD AGE 233 

involuntarily, the simple variations in handwriting and 
the more subtle variations in literary style carry deeper 
messages than the writers are aware of, or perhaps de- 
sire. I have corresponded for some years with a remark- 
able man for whose talents and character I have a gen- 
uine admiration. But he lives on different levels, some 
of them more admirable, some, less. He does not tell 
me these things in words, — his letters are always decor- 
ous, — but he tells them to me with even greater certi- 
tude. I destroy certain letters, and as they turn to ashes' 
on my hearth, I say to myself, " Am I a priest, that I 
should be carried into the moral valleys of the confes- 
sional ? " When a great man dies, or even a notable, 
out comes a volume of his " Life and Letters." After 
that, all laudations and defenses are equally futile, for 
the testimony is with us, for and against, and it is un- 
impeachable. 

I have omitted Latin and Greek from the studies of 
our wholesome lad, because, at seventeen, it does not 
seem to me essential that he should know either of 
them. I am familiar with the arguments in behalf of 
both studies, and with most of them I heartily agree. 
It is a wonderful discipline to study either Latin or 
Greek, and something of an achievement to master them, 
especially Greek. It is undeniably true that the wisdom 
of the ancient world is still deeply worth the considera- 
tion of our present generation, and cannot be wholly 
gained in translation. And it is obvious that a knowl- 
edge of Latin is of material aid in the study of modern 
French and Italian and Spanish. But the claim that 
the classics help one's own literary style is not, I think, 
necessarily true. They may, or they may not. If the dis- 
cipline of such study, and the wise content tend to 



234 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

clarify the thought, then of necessity they help to 
purify the literary style. But mere linguistic erudition, 
so far from helping one's style, may even serve to make 
it ponderous and ineffectual. The mere tendency to love 
and imitate classical forms of construction may become 
in the end a grave fault. The practical convenience of 
classical knowledge is certainly less now than formerly, 
— the classics have all found able translators, and may 
profitably be read in the vernacular ; modern writers 
fight shy of all foreign quotations ; the mottoes and in- 
scriptions on coats of arms, seals, crests, and the like, 
and those still used in legal parlance, are too well known 
to need special study. But acknowledging to the full 
the large value of classical study, both as discipline and 
enlightener, I still deliberately feel that it is not wise 
for boys between fourteen and seventeen. And my one 
reason is that there are other studies more helpful and 
more needed. While our American boys have such lit- 
tle mastery of their own language, it seems to me futile 
in the extreme to be giving them a still more faulty 
knowledge of Latin and Greek. The time may come at 
college when they will want to take up one or both of 
these languages, and can do so to advantage, but it is 
certainly not a proper season for such study while more 
immediate and pressing demands remain unsatisfied. It 
even seems to me a positive attack upon all sound schol- 
arship to have boys and girls take up the study of Latin 
and Greek in the slovenly way that we see on all sides 
of us, and with so little interest and conviction. Both 
studies require time, Latin four years of solid daily 
work, and Greek at least six, and if we have not adequate 
time to give to them, as I think we have not, it is far 
better to do something else and to do it thoroughly. 



THE AWKWARD AGE 235 

But it is time exceedingly well spent to include in 
our English study a careful drill in etymology, and espe- 
cially a drill in Latin and Greek roots. The whole sub- 
ject can be well covered in reasonable time and is an 
immediate and gratifying help in the choice and under- 
standing of words. Our English vocabulary has been 
growing by leaps and bounds. In one generation it 
has increased from one hundred thousand words to 
over four hundred thousand, and apparently the end 
is not yet. Most of these terms are non-literary and 
concern only the student of technology. But on the other 
hand, there are many new words now passing from the 
dictionary into the vocabulary of every-day life, and 
it behooves an alert, contemporaneous lad to know the 
origin and meaning of the more common of these deriva- 
tives. Such etymological drill was more general, I think, 
thirty or forty years ago than it is now, when in real- 
ity the practical need is far greater. I well remember 
the thrill that I felt, as a boy, when I first met the word 
"telepathic," and found that I knew the meaning at 
sight. We might, I think, profitably extend our study 
of foreign roots to other languages than Latin and 
Greek, and so augment our practical knowledge of an 
over-rich vocabulary. 

So important does such a thorough and practical 
study of English seem to me, so necessary that a lad at 
seventeen should be able to speak and write the lan- 
guage with clearness and distinction, that I have not only 
placed English first in the list of studies, but I would un- 
hesitatingly balance its worth against the other five stud- 
ies of the list. If, by any chance, we may not have Eng- 
lish and the rest, let us by all means take English, and 
let us make the test the practical one of actual usage. 



236 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

The scheme of taking literature and history together, 
and treating them both as reading courses, rather than 
as study courses, has everything to commend it and 
nothing to gainsay it. Our English friends laugh at us, 
and quite properly, for our national fondness for study- 
ing literature. " Literature," they say, with genuine 
Elizabethan light-heartedness, " is not a thing to study ; 
it is a thing to browse upon, to assimilate, to enjoy ; it 
is something to cheer the heart and refresh the spirit. 
Kead far and wide and appreciatively, but, for Heaven's 
sake, do not spoil what you read by pulling it apart, 
and studying it. That is like analyzing the flowers in 
a bride's bouquet, or on the casket of a dead friend ! " 
I think that they are quite right. In the few months 
of my own limited school life, I recall one particular 
sacrilege, — I was taught to parse from " Paradise 
Lost ": " ' So saying, from her side, the fatal key, sad 
instrument of all our woe, she took,' — the fourth boy 
in the third row will please parse hey''' It was years 
before I could read the poem with any degree of pleas- 
ure and appreciation. 

In selecting books to read with our boys, we may 
sometimes be so fortunate as to influence their choice, 
but to be wise, we must always read the thing which 
genuinely interests them, not the thing which we think 
ought to interest them. We might paraphrase Miss 
Etchingham's famous remark, — " People are only 
amused by what amuses them " — by substituting the 
word " interest." It is time worse than lost to read 
things to boys when they are not listening. I know, 
for I have done it ! Far better to read Jules Verne, or 
Sherlock Holmes, if that is what the boys want, than 
to read the best of Emerson or Matthew Arnold or 



THE AWKWARD AGE 237 

Walter Pater. But a wise teacher can arouse desirable 
interests and then proceed to satisfy them. This is 
very different from the futile process of meeting an 
interest which does not exist, and which the teacher 
knows full well does not exist. 

By treating history as literature, and by combining 
the history and literature of a given period and people, 
it is possible to arouse genuine enthusiasm on the part 
of thoroughgoing, active boys. If, for example, the first 
year of the high school be devoted to the history and lit- 
erature of Greece and Rome ; the second year, to the 
history and literature of mediaeval Europe ; and the third 
year, to the history and literature of modern Europe 
and America, the boys will enter into the spirit of the 
period and country they are considering and for the 
moment will be Greeks and Romans, or mediaeval knights 
and crusaders, or modern statesmen and leaders. I have 
had an active lad in knickerbockers grow absolutely red 
in the face in his excitement over a Greek play done 
into English blank verse by Andrew Lang. It is hard 
to understand why it was ever thought desirable that 
boys should study literature, and learn history. Such 
detailed knowledge has no vital interest or importance 
in the life of a real boy. The genuinely valuable ele- 
ment in both literature and history is the appeal to the 
spirit. It is their high office to kindle a boy's intelli- 
gence, to enlarge the boundaries of his little world, to 
take him into the atmosphere of big events, to charm 
him with the wide sweep of the impersonal and univer- 
sal. A boy ought to be carried off his feet, in one mood, 
by literature, in another mood, by history. His face 
ought to flush, his pulse to beat the faster. He ought 
to be incited to efforts and heroisms. He ought to be 



238 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

immensely stirred by all this pageantry of human 
thought and human deed. It is incredible that we should 
ever have thought it wise so to present literature and 
history as to leave a boy cold ; and we do leave him 
palpably cold when we present these dynamic subjects 
in the dull literalism of word-analysis and memorized 
fact. 

It is amazingly stupid, I think, to ask a boy, for ex- 
ample, to memorize the rapidly falling events in the 
career of the first Napoleon. It is true that the Corsi- 
can occupies a prominent place in history, — but in what 
history ? Not in the history of the spirit ; only in the 
history of an outer and transient anarchy and disorder. 
He changed the face of Europe, but only for a passing 
moment. The verdict of our own age is increasingly 
that he was a criminal of genius, a man of momentary 
and overwhelming efficiency, but of ends essentially and 
permanently ignoble. More and more, the Napoleonic 
tradition reduces to a tale of cheap personal adventure. 
The story of Napoleon will interest an alert boy, and 
there is no harm in his hearing it, especially if he read 
on to St. Helena and the European reaction. But to 
have a boy learn this story in all its murderous details, 
and to regard Napoleon as a great man and a hero is an 
offense against intelligence and morality. If he desires 
to know how a clever, modern Frenchman regards the 
exploits of Napoleon, he has only to read the chapter 
called "Trinco," in Anatole France's book, "L'lle des 
Pingouins." 

In the case of our own Civil War, it may be desir- 
able that a boy should read a running summary of the 
issues involved, and how they were finally solved; but 
it is absolutely undesirable that he should know the 



THE AWKWARD AGE 239 

battles, study the battle-fields, or occupy himself in any 
way with the lurid and fratricidal details of a conflict 
which the best men in the North and the best men in 
the South now regard as a monstrous blunder and ca- 
tastrophe. To have a boy memorize the details of the 
wrongdoing seems to me the height of unreason, for it 
not only wastes his time and prevents his occupying 
himself with things that are profitable, but it fills his 
mind with undesirable images and passions. I do not 
myself know the battles of the Civil War, and if I were 
so unfortunate as to know them, I would do my very 
best to forget them. The principle of immediacy con- 
demns quite unequivocably the detailed study of the his- 
tory of any period, either heroic or mistaken. To be ed- 
ucated is not to seek new light upon dead issues, but new 
light upon still living issues, of which there is always 
sore need. Scientific study has this immediacy. Every 
well-informed scientist knows in a general way the his- 
tory of the development of scientific thought, and he 
passes this knowledge on in a very condensed and cas- 
ual form to his students. But we would esteem any science 
teacher unworthy of his chair, if he occupied the time of 
his students in reviewing the details of old controversies 
and discredited quarrels, what the Platonists said to 
the Neptunists and what the Darwinians thought of the 
Creationists. On the contrary, he touches lightly upon 
all these matters, emphasizing only what was perma- 
nently significant, and devoting his time and genius to 
the illumination of the eternal Now. Of the general 
futility of minute historical research, I have nothing to 
say. If a man prefers to walk through life backward, 
with his face turned always toward the past, that is, of 
Course, his own affair. But that we should ask alert 



240 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

boys, between fourteen and seventeen, to turn aside from 
the momentous, palpitating present and to look behind 
them at anything except the genuinely significant, do- 
ing it, mark you, in the name of education, does impress 
me as irrational and culpable. 

I have given literature and history second place in 
the list of high-school studies, even ranking them above 
mathematics and science, because they have to do pri- 
marily with the human spirit, and education is the un- 
folding and perfecting of this spirit. But I hope that 
I have made it abundantly clear that in this estimate 
I do not mean the study of literature and history, but, 
on the contrary, the free and voluntary reading of those 
portions of literature which are worthy and beautiful, 
and those chapters in history which are significant and 
profitable. The full history of literature is about as 
dull as the detailed history of dynasties. If writers had 
nothing to say and said it badly, let us ignore them. If 
king and parliament governed wrongly, and the com- 
mon people had neither spirit nor courage, let as forget 
them. By all means, let us in memory, in monument, 
in record, grant immortality to the excellent, the sig- 
nificant, the humanly victorious; but why grant it to the 
unworthy, the trivial, the brutal? If we lose discrim- 
ination, the Gita says, we lose everything. 

When you reflect that the average American boy 
does not hold up his head and look you straight in the 
face when he speaks to you, that he does not use good, 
plain, well-enunciated English, that he cannot write a 
presentable letter, that he has such small hold upon 
personal hygiene that he fails to take a daily bath or to 
keep his breath sweet and clean, that he carries him- 
self deplorably and walks with a wretched slouch, it 



THE AWKWARD AGE 241 

seems to me entirely absurd to have him spend any of 
his time in committing to memory the social and polit- 
ical and military blunders of the past, rather than in 
mending his own present ways. 

A wholesome lad, at seventeen, ought to have a gen- 
eral idea of the sweep of the world process in all human 
concerns, but he need not wade through battle, murder, 
and sudden death, through the long unprofitable story 
of gossip, intrigue, and broken faith. He can gain this 
general idea from the literature that has survived, and 
from history frankly treated as literature, and selected 
because it is significant and important, not because it is 
trivial and scandalous. It is a long sweep from Ashur- 
banipal to our own next President, but as a bit of liter- 
ature, reduced to what is profitable and important, it 
can be communicated to boys in three years, and still 
leave abundant time for the other studies of the curric- 
ulum, and for the acquisition of the much more import- 
ant arts of a rational daily life. 

As a practical matter, it is wise to include geography 
in the hours devoted to literature and history, rather 
than to make it a separate study. It may be both polit- 
ical and physical geography, and may profitably be con- 
sidered as the setting of the world drama, as the stage 
scenery, so to speak. To get the proper keynote for such 
coordinated study we ought undoubtedly to turn to the 
arts of expression in general, and so include painting, 
sculpture, architecture, and music, as well as literature. 
Up to the birth of our own age of science and inven- 
tion, these arts of expression, our so-called fine arts, will 
give some indication of the proper amount of time and 
emphasis to be placed upon the history of a people, and 
the geography of their sphere of influence. These arts 



242 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

of expression, taken in conjunction with the social and 
political institutions evolved, are the measure of the 
depth and value of what a people thought and felt and 
did. If they simply encumbered the ground, it is not 
of the least importance to know how long they did it, 
and how much ground they encumbered, — both their 
history and geography may well be ignored. 

Judged by this criterion of worth, those twenty-nine 
brilliant years which made up the age of Pericles will 
easily outbalance many less fruitful years in Grecian 
history that went before and came after. But even 
here, there is no merit in memorizing the events them- 
selves. It was a flowering time in the life of the human 
spirit, and our own best appreciation is to enjoy it and 
give thanks. By pictures and plaster casts we can re- 
produce its sculpture and architecture. By admirable 
translations we can enjoy its literature. In the best his- 
tories of the period we can familiarize ourselves with 
its social and political institutions. And then, when the 
boys have caught the glow of that illuminated time, it 
will be pertinent to ask, in hope, what led to this efful- 
gence of the spirit ; and later to ask in sorrow, what led 
to the extinguishment of the light. 

It is through such participation and inquiry that his- 
tory and geography and literature and the fine arts 
generally may be used to quicken the human spirit in 
our boys, and so become genuine sources of education. 
It is a great practical advantage to coordinate this group 
of studies, for it enables a boy to live the period over 
again in his own soul, and it saves him from the dissi- 
pation and confusion in thought which inevitably result 
when at the same time he studies the history of one 
period, the geography of another country, and the liter- 



THE AWKWARD AGE 243 

ature of a third people. I have watched little children 
going to school, and have counted the books they carry. 
Often they have as many books as they are years old. 
Then, without entering the door, I know that they go 
to a poor school, where the childish mind is being con- 
fused instead of educated. There is no study so impor- 
tant for us as English ; there is no study more valuable 
in the unfolding of the human spirit than this history- 
literature group, — yet we handle the one badly and 
head the other in a totally wrong direction. 

Mathematics has always been valued by educators as 
a culture-study, and by utility people as a major tool. 
It has held an honorable place in all schools since before 
the days of Thales up to the present time. No one, I 
think, would seriously question the propriety of this per- 
sistent honor, and few, I fear, would be able to justify 
their belief. My own experience with mathematical 
study, was, I take it, fairly typical. During the two years 
that I went to school, I was taught faithfully but un- 
intelligently the usual trio, — arithmetic, alegebra, and 
plane geometry. 1 disliked the whole subject intensely, 
and when it came to geometry, being still a small boy, 
I frankly wept. At college, the instruction was distinctly 
better, and I even stirred myself to take a mathematical 
prize; but still my spirit was quite untouched. The prize- 
taking was a mere tour-de-force, a bit of intellectual 
bravado prompted by pride rather than by any love of 
mathematics. It was not until after I left college that 
I really taught myself mathematics, and caught some 
vision of the wonderful beauty in this subtle, intangi- 
ble world of the quantitative. The appeal is perhaps 
more to one's sense of logic and to the intellect delight- 



244 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

ing in the exercise of its own powers, the appeal of ex- 
act and necessary truth as opposed to the uncertainties 
of speculation; yet it seems to me that when rightly 
handled, this intellectual appeal may be made educa- 
tional in the deepest spiritual sense. 

Arithmetic does not easily touch the spirit of a boy. 
It commonly stimulates his greed by concerning itself 
with buying and selling and interest and percentage 
and other unprofitable matters. The truth is that arith- 
metic, as a science, is very difficult. When a boy has 
some skill in the elementary operations of addition, sub- 
traction, multiplication, division, fractions, and deci- 
mals, — a skill, by the way, which he will usually have 
gained, at fourteen, through experience — it will be well 
to omit advanced arithmetic until he has made some 
progress in the more concrete problems of algebra and 
geometry. But the actual divisions in mathematics and 
the order in which they are presented to the unwilling 
mind of a boy, are less important than the broad spirit 
in which they are taught, and his initial unwillingness 
turned to appetite. The best teaching, I suspect, would 
dispense with all labels and boundaries, and would strive 
with religious zeal to impart the art of mathematical 
thinking and the result of mathematical research, and 
to present them as desirable elements in our own 
habit of thought. For this reason it seems to me that 
the ordinary rank and file of elementary teachers, 
and particularly the women who confess, almost in 
tears, that they hate mathematics, ought not to be al- 
lowed to teach the subject, for they not only waste the 
time of the boys now, but they reduce the chance of 
genuine mathematical knowledge in the future. It is 
a subject which ought either to be taught by one of a 



THE AWKWARD AGE 245 

sound mathematical habit of thought, or else left un- 
taught. 

Our cardinal principle of immediacy makes short work 
of any specious argument to the effect that, well-done or 
badly-done, the lower mathematics must be specifically 
taught under the three subdivisions, solely because col- 
lege examiners require it and future employers regard 
it as useful. In truth, it is the present moment which 
is the supreme thing. It must be used to the best pur- 
pose regardless of everything else in the world, past or 
present. The mystic is quite right in saying that it is 
in the present moment that man walks with God. It is' 
in this spirit that we ought to teach mathematics, and, 
indeed, everything else. It would mean practically that 
we must teach mathematics as a present mode of thought, 
as a new and more exact and more helpful way of look- 
ing at things. As such it is not to be apprehended as a 
task, but as a much-to-be-desired privilege. 

The fundamental idea in all mathematics is quantity. 
A boy's placing in mathematics is sound just in pro- 
portion as he takes hold of the idea of quantity without 
attaching to it any false rigidity. Quantity in nature is 
essentially a variable. It reaches any dimension by a 
process of growth or shrinkage, and since these processes 
are continuous, the given dimension is but momentary. 
Now my objection to elementary mathematics as taught 
by ordinary teachers under the name of arithmetic, is 
that it fixes two wholly erroneous ideas in a boy's mind, 
ideas calculated to give trouble to the end of the chap- 
ter. The first idea is that mathematics has to do pri- 
marily with number, when in reality number is the least 
important element in mathematics, is a mere coefficient 
or multiplier, and is large or small wholly according to 



246 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

the unit employed. The oft-quoted statement that two 
and two make four is not the truism which it appears, 
on the surface, to be. In fact, it is neither true nor un- 
true until it is elucidated. If we mean that two units 
of a given kind added to two other units of the same 
kind make four units of the given kind, then the state- 
ment is obviously true, but its truth depends upon this 
identity, and not upon any abstract and necessary truth 
in the numerals themselves. This suppression of the 
essential element makes arithmetic difficult to a boy of 
a good, clear way of thinking, and quite confirms in his 
intellectual sins the boy who works according to rule, 
without thinking. 

And the second erroneous idea is that quantities are 
of fixed value, when, as I have been pointing out, they 
are inherently variable, and are only fixed under given, 
transient conditions. Later, when a boy comes to study 
the higher mathematics, he learns, of course, that numer- 
als play a very insignificant part, and that the quanti- 
ties with which he deals are variables. As this is the 
fundamental conception in all mathematics, it is clear 
that the study ought to start out with this conception 
and never do violence to it. It is manifestly unsound 
and unscientific to start a boy out badly, and trust to 
Fate or a better teacher further along the line to set 
him straight later. 

In three years, a fairly industrious lad ought to cover 
the ground usually comprised in arithmetic, elementary 
algebra, and plane geometry. Indeed, I think he might, 
without giving undue time to mathematics, cover solid 
geometry, as well, or else plane trigonometry. But the 
important thing is not how much ground he has cov- 
ered, but how thoroughly his thought has entered 



THE AWKWARD AGE 247 

this subtle world of the quantitative, enriching its own 
quality and enlarging its boundaries. The whole value 
of the study is whether it makes our lad more of a per- 
son, and adds to the freedom and dimensions of his life 
by adding to the freedom and dimensions of his thought. 
But meanwhile, lest our average taxpayer grow impa- 
tient over the school rates, and fancy that we are carry- 
ing his money into the unprofitable regions of the air, 
it may be well to remark that if the high school could 
really develop in a boy the habit of sound mathemat- 
ical thought, he would hardly be allowed to go to college, 
— the business world would bid as greedily for his serv- 
ice as our universities now bid for a possible football 
player. It seems to me that mathematics should rank 
very high in the study-course of a lad between fourteen 
and seventeen, higher than science or any foreign lan- 
guage either ancient or modern; for if you leave the 
quantitative element out of his thought you have im- 
mensely lowered its quality by making it less exact and 
less intimate, and in the world of thinking persons, you 
have doomed the lad to a grade below the first. In ad- 
dition you have made it impossible for him to be truly 
scientific. Science differs from sound common sense 
only in being quantitative. The modern scientist is first 
of all a mathematician. His work is to measure. He has 
expressed - his debt to this chosen tool of research in 
that well-known acknowledgment : " We have only so 
much science as we have mathematics." 

In suggesting the high-school study-course in science, 
I have been prompted by the thought that a systematic 
knowledge of plant and animal life would be of large 
value and interest to a lad who presumably lives much 



248 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

out of doors, and already knows something of plants 
and animals from direct personal observation. And I 
have also thought that such knowledge might help the 
lad to understand his own life better, and to view with 
sounder emotion and in a larger, less personal way the 
five-fold cycle of birth, nutrition, growth, reproduction, 
and death. My own technical training was in geology 
and mining engineering ; and I shall always be pro- 
foundly grateful for the wealth of intellectual interests 
which this training aroused. But I am under no illusion 
in regard to nature-study. It may be made exceedingly 
dull, and often is, but it may also be made a source 
of joy and genuine enlightenment. The way to make it 
dull is to make it thorough and microscopic. The way 
to make it helpful is to be wholesomely superficial and 
to deal with organisms large enough to be visible and 
interesting to boys and girls. But the field of science 
is large. There are localities where the study of miuer- 
als and rocks might be more suitable than the study of 
plants and animals. And there are seasons and circum- 
stances when the indoor study of physics might be wiser 
than either. But it is not so much the specific subject 
that counts in the final reckoning, as it is the way the 
subject is handled, and the habit of thought it has in- 
duced. If the boys have been led to think intelligently 
about their surroundings, to observe accurately, to be 
additionally faithful to the principle of cause and effect, 
then the early science teaching has accomplished its 
purpose. 

In the third year of the high school, the instruction 
in personal hygiene has, of course, a specific and prac- 
tical end in mind. Our lad, if wholesomely brought up, 
has already been taught to take care of his body and 



THE AWKWARD AGE 249 

his faculties and to make the most of them. It is now 
proposed to make the instruction more definite and 
personal. Up to this time every effort has been made 
to induce sound habits in food, sleep, dress, baths, ex- 
ercise, fresh air, — in a word, to instill a passion for 
cleanness in all things. At sixteen these habits should 
be well established, and if he is really educated, our 
lean, eager, beautiful lad ought to be, above everything 
else, clean, — clean in body, clean in mind, clean in 
spirit. He ought to be settled in the habit of health. 
Now he must learn still further upon what it depends. 
It is too soon, I think, to teach in any detail the in- 
tricacies of anatomy and physiology, for these ought to 
rest upon a somewhat full knowledge of physics and 
chemistry. But a lad at this age can reasonably learn 
the rationale of what he has been taught to do, and so 
deepen his hold upon the sources of power. As this in- 
struction is to be practical as well as scientific, it is 
profitable, I think, to run through the events in the 
boy's own day from the moment he awakens in the 
morning until he goes to sleep at night, asking the rea- 
son for each act, investigating the wisdom of any sug- 
gested substitute, and inquiring with patience and 
inventiveness into the merits of a variety of schemes 
of life. What the personal hygiene ought to do, as its 
final outcome, is to help a boy organize his daily life in 
accordance with the highest reason. It ought to help 
him bring about in his own personal life the same high 
effectiveness that in literature we call style. There is 
as great a difference between slovenly living and essen- 
tial good form as there is between slovenly writing and 
literary style. An educated boy, at seventeen, ought to 
be ashamed to be ill, to carry himself badly, to slouch 



250 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

through life, to whine and make excuses, to be off 
guard, to be less agreeable in his own home, — in short 
to be at any time or in any place one whit less than his 
very best. What we want is a thoroughbred in morals, 
in manners, and in person. I include under personal 
hygiene the whole miscellany of daily human conduct, 
both the fundamental ethics and aesthetics of life, as well 
as the question of effective health. And it should drive 
home the inexorable doctrine that in no department of 
conduct can one have correct habits at command, and 
slovenly habits in between times ; that life is all of a 
piece ; that good breeding, like good literary style, is 
not a thing to be put on and off like a frock coat and 
a tall hat, but a state of body and mind and spirit which 
comes only with lifelong faithfulness, and vanishes with 
intermittency. 

Personally I much prefer this well-bred young per- 
son who is strong and handsome, who carries himself 
well, who speaks with clearness and distinction, who has 
permanent manners and human charm, to the typical 
young person whom the high school now produces; and 
I know full well that the great outside, common-sense 
world stands with me in this natural preference. That 
the schools do not devote themselves to the production 
of these human thoroughbreds is due, I think, to the 
fact that their work is planned according to tradition, to 
meet the college requirements, and not with a single eye 
to the desired result, — the wholesome lad of seventeen 
whom we should all so like to meet, and so rarely do. 

There is only one way to formulate a wise educational 
programme, and that is to work backward from desired 
effects to efficient causes. If education means anything 
at all, if it is a rational process instead of a mere national 



THE AWKWARD AGE 251 

fetish, it must be a practical operation by which we ac- 
complish the social purpose. If the social purpose is hu- 
man wealth, a present world of beautiful, accomplished, 
good persons, then the educational process must so shape 
itself as to produce this contemporary human wealth. 

The argument for French and elementary German is 
not so convincing as the arguments for English, liter- 
ature, history, mathematics, and science ; and certainly 
not of sufficient weight to allow French and German to 
interfere with the attainment of proficiency in the more 
important group of studies. However, with strong alert 
boys who are reasonably guarded from the adolescent 
distractions which now make our ordinary high school 
so little effective, there ought to be ample time in three 
years for all the studies recommended. If French and 
German are not both possible, I should be disposed to 
choose French. It has the more immediate usefulness, 
and its splendid lucidity of expression will help the boy 
to a similar virtue in English, and will give him an im- 
patience with all that is turgid and obscure. Even a 
limited knowledge of French and of French literature 
shows itself at once in a crisper, clearer mode of speech 
in English. I have elsewhere called attention to the fact 
that the admitted masters of English prose have been in 
many cases confessedly indebted to the clarifying in- 
fluence of French literature, and I have recorded my 
own debt for the help given me in less ambitious technical 
writing. In earlier years much of my own work was for 
scientific journals, and I had the frequent task of turn- 
ing rather complicated scientific data into easy popular 
English. Unless a man has attempted this particular 
task he can hardly appreciate the inherent difficulty. 
After some experimenting I found that for me the best 



252 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

preparation was to turn aside to a good French book, 
or even to a good translation from the French, and 
there bathe my spirit in an atmosphere of direct, lucid 
expression, of compelling visual images, of unequivocal 
meanings. In German one sometimes seems to be mov- 
ing in an irritating and unnecessary fog. In French, 
the sun always shines, and the air is beautifully, trans- 
parently clear. Almost invariably I came back from 
such excursions the better qualified for the task ahead 
of me. 

While French is a useful accomplishment for a boy 
who is afterwards to be reasonably cosmopolitan in his 
travels and reading, a working knowledge of the lan- 
guage has the great immediate value of helping him to 
think and to express himself in English. This means, 
of course, a thorough verbal and grammatical knowledge 
such as is only gained by genuinely hard study. He 
must have this in order to catch the French habit of 
thought and expression in all its splendid swiftness, di- 
rectness, and lucidity. French is not a difficult language ; 
its vocabulary is limited, as compared to our own, and 
its grammatical forms, even including the difficult sub- 
junctive mood, are not beyond the powers of a well- 
educated boy of seventeen. It can best be taught by an 
American who has lived in either France or French 
Switzerland. But his pronunciation must be authentic 
and acceptable or he will prove a poor guide, and the 
boy will probably speak very bad French all the rest of 
his life. But a man may himself speak with the purest 
accent, and still be an ineffectual teacher through dull- 
ness of hearing or even through aural inattention. I 
should almost say that the teacher of any foreign lan- 
guage ought to be a trained musician, not only sensitive 



THE AWKWARD AGE 253 

to the sounds that he makes with his own voice, but 
equally sensitive to the imitative sounds made by his 
pupils. When he gets through the high school, a boy who 
has been shielded both from distractions and from a too 
complicated curriculum, ought to be a junior master of 
French, able to read it as rapidly and correctly as Eng- 
lish, able to speak it intelligently and fluently, able to 
write it with reasonable speed and accuracy. Of course, 
few college men could satisfy this practical requirement, 
but they have not been brought up as wisely as our 
wholesome lad of seventeen, are not so much of a per- 
son as he, and in the matters of the intellect have lived 
lives of frank dissipation. When I visited L'Ecole de 
Tile de France, at Liancourt, near Paris, I sat at lunch- 
eon with one of the headmasters, and perhaps eight 
lively, attractive boys. They all spoke such excellent, 
idiomatic English that I made the mistake of thinking 
that they were English. They talked incessantly, of 
their games, of their plans for the afternoon, of their 
studies, and no one seemed to hesitate for either word 
or construction. When I expressed my surprise that so 
many English boys should be attending a French school, 
the headmaster answered quickly, "But they are not 
English. They are all French, every one of them ! " I 
am afraid that no Frenchman, visiting an American 
school, could make a similar mistake. When Pierre 
Loti was the guest of Carmen Sylva, the Queen of 
Roumania, she read to him from one of her own books. 
It was only after a considerable time, when the queen 
turned to one of her women-in-waiting to ask for a cer- 
tain word, that he discovered the book to be in German, 
and that the queen translated as she read. 

In preferring French to German for high-school boys 



254 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

I am not indifferent to the music of well-spoken German 
or to the high seriousness of its content; but I think 
that boys of this age are less qualified to cope with the 
intricacies of German thought and expression, and come 
out victorious. They are very prone to get lost in the 
fog. Advanced German, especially, seems to me too 
difficult for average boys under eighteen. It would 
better be left to the college, and if a boy undertake 
German at all in the high school, it should be elemen- 
tary German, and should perhaps be limited to the final 
year. If studied thoroughly and persistently for one 
year, a boy of sixteen can hope to get an excellent foun- 
dation, a practical " service " German, and will be in a 
position to pass on, with advantage, to the more exact- 
ing work at college. 

I am assuming in all these six studies a final schol- 
arship much in excess of that commonly exhibited by 
our present high-school graduates, and I am resting my 
assumption upon two considerations, — first, that our 
beginner, at fourteen, is better human material than 
boys less scientifically developed in spirit and body ; 
and secondly, that first-rate work during this receptive 
age, fourteen to seventeen, is easily possible if we will 
reduce the curriculum to needful and important studies, 
if we will stick very close to the present moment, cut- 
ting out all unprofitable memory feats and fatigue, and 
if, finally, we will eliminate quite resolutely that sec- 
ond programme, the programme of adolescent distrac- 
tions, which now runs parallel to the official course of 
study, and is regarded by so many boys and girls, and 
by the tradesmen who profit by it, as being really the 
more important of the two. I do not for a moment pre- 



THE AWKWARD AGE 255 

tend that this high grade of scholarship, or anything 
nearly so good, can ever be attained under the present 
dissipating methods of American high school life. 

It will also be noticed that while I have insisted that i 
education should rest upon economics as well as religion, 
that boys and girls, from the nursery up, should be 
taught to face the bread-and-butter question, and to 
recognize in contemporaneous labor-power the source of 
their own subsistence, I have not, in this chapter, said 
one word about that popular idol, vocational education. 
I have omitted any mention of it, not through inadvert- 
ence, but quite deliberately. Not only does it seem to 
me that human thoroughbreds are more consistent and 
desirable products for us to work for, those of us who 
love America and love civilization, than are the pre- 
mature industrialists of the trade schools, but I also 
know that our social and industrial life will never be 
sound until it excludes children and boys and girls from 
all gainful occupations, and throws the burden of our 
daily bread where it properly belongs, upon the broad 
shoulders of strong, well-educated, mature men and 
women. A high school boy ought to be made to realize 
that he is being supported willingly and generously by 
an older generation, but that the only way in which he 
can accept the favor in a loyal and manly spirit is by 
using his opportunities to the utmost, and by being 
ready, when the time comes, to do his own full share 
towards the maintenance of the world. We will render 
the greater social service, if instead of pushing a boy 
prematurely into industry, we teach him that when a 
man he may not honorably live at the expense of some 
one else's labor. Vocationalism is an integral part of 
all sound education, but it is an illusion when inter- 



256 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

preted to mean that some shall work prematurely, and 
that others shall never work. Vocationalism, in the 
hands of its true friends, is an abiding sentiment run- 
ning through the whole of life, prompting boys and 
girls to study, to grow strong, to help in the home, 
while it prompts all men and women, in their days of 
strength, to turn the wheels of a needful industry. 



XI 

THE LIFE FORCE 

I was lecturing, some months ago, to a normal class 
of twenty-five students. They varied in age from per- 
haps twenty years up to forty. Teaching them, as I am 
here teaching, that elementary education must prima- 
rily concern itself with the spirit and the body, I de- 
sired to recommend to them a brief and authoritative 
textbook on physiology, one that would serve as refer- 
ence in all bodily questions and give them a clear, scien- 
tific account of the reproductive process. Not knowing 
of any book sufficiently concise for my purpose, I con- 
sulted a well-known textbook publishing house. I might 
have fared better had the man I sought been in town, 
but, in his absence, I fell into strange hands, an elderly 
gentleman who listened with growing excitement to the 
statement of my errand, and then hastened to assure 
me, in a most agitated way, that not only was no such 
textbook published, but that it would not do to publish 
it. He went on to explain, with unabated excitement, 
that a committee of competent persons had gone into 
the whole subject, most thoroughly, and had decided 
(with what I understood to be finality) that all sex 
knowledge tended to increase sex immorality ; and that 
the present time-honored conspiracy of silence was the 
only prudent and permissible course. Finally my elderly 
gentleman, still excited, felicitated both himself and 
me that chance had thrown me into his hands, and so 



258 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

saved me from what would have been, at the best, a 
hazardous experiment. 

I am quoting this experience, both because it is suffi- 
ciently recent to have left a strong and disagreeable im- 
pression, and also because it is, I believe, very typical 
of the attitude of many well-meaning persons. In my 
own boyhood, if I caught anything of the essential 
spirit of the times, this conspiracy of silence was even 
more pronounced than now. Personally, I did not know 
how children came into the world and I was never 
taught. My ideas were correspondingly naive and un- 
scientific. I grew up in a very careful, very solicitous 
household, and yet no word was ever spoken to me on 
this most important subject, except references so vague 
and indefinite that I quite failed to understand them, 
and gained the impression that it would be indeli- 
cate to ask for any explanation. By significant silences, 
by tenuous innuendo, by shrugs of the shoulder, by 
raised eyebrows, by lowered eyes, by awkward, shamed 
laughter, the grown-up world of that period grievously 
misled the younger generation where it should have 
guided and instructed us. I came to believe that there 
was something indecent about the naked body ; that, in- 
stead of being something to be strengthened and made 
beautiful, it was something to be ashamed of, and 
covered up. I knew that there was something wonderful 
and sacred about infancy and childhood, that Christ 
had been born of a woman, and that we celebrated both 
the Annunciation and the Birth. I knew that the 
Family was a very real and holy institution, the social 
unit upon which all else depended. I knew from experi- 
ence the priceless tenderness of mother-love, the utter 
devotion of a son's love. And yet society allowed us to 



THE LIFE FORCE 259 

grow up not only ignorant of the sex arrangements by 
which the sacred drama of family life is brought about, 
but worse than ignorant, under the impression that it 
was indelicate to speak about such matters, or to know 
about them, or even to think about them, however 
gravely and chastely. I had no instruction in sex 
matters, until later Nature taught me in her own direct, 
frank way, leaving me perplexed and but partially in- 
formed. The first specific reference I ever heard to any 
sex matters was from vulgar boys at school, and still 
more vulgar lads at college. The effect was needlessly 
painful and shocking, without being enlightening. 

Looking back upon my own boyhood, and recalling the 
elderly agitated gentleman whom I recently consulted, 
I see now that this conspiracy of silence is the real 
indecency. It is not as if we parents and teachers could 
deal at our pleasure with a world with sex, or without 
sex. It is not given us to choose, any more than in the 
case of dogma or economic implications. We find our- 
selves in a world charged with sex. We are all men or 
women, — we are not hermaphrodites, and the whole 
problem is to deal with sex wisely and decently. To 
ignore it, after the manner of the days of my youth, or 
according to the present counsel of our elderly publisher, 
is to expose a pure-minded lad to grave and disabling 
misapprehensions of life ; and a less high-minded lad to 
temptations which may wreck him physically and mor- 
ally. 

If the habit of silence on sex matters led to a phe- 
nomenal national purity, there might be something to 
be said in its favor. But when one recalls that we have 
in America between half a million and a million admitted 
prostitutes, and probably tens or even hundreds of thou- 



260 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

sands of other women privately leading irregular lives ; 
and that in many of our smaller American towns, it is 
frankly stated that there is hardly one chaste man, it 
must b.e confessed that this cowardly method of silence 
is not justified by its fruit. It is infinitely better and 
more rational that our boys shall know all there is to 
be known about sex from high-minded, chaste men, — 
their fathers preferably, their teachers if need be, — 
than that they should gain a partial, distorted knowl- 
edge from vulgar boys at school or still more vulgar 
lads at college. 

And the time for boys to learn about sex is neither 
before nor after adolescence. It is when the first prompt- 
ings of sex make themselves known, and the boy feels a 
very natural and wholesome curiosity about this myste- 
rious, cosmic Life Force which seems bent upon claim- 
ing him for its purposes. 

I have called my own experience typical, but in one 
respect it was extreme. I have long believed that ideal- 
ists are the really practical people of the world. Now 
dreamy, idealistic boys have this same curious streak of 
practicality in their make-up, and a blundering talent 
for trying to live up to their theories. If you see a boy 
doing furtively some rather unusual thing, and doing 
it with an almost religious zeal, you may be quite sure 
that he is an idealist, and has some bee in his bonnet 
which he is awkwardly attempting to translate into 
action. In my own case, although no specific word had 
ever been said to that effect, I gained from reference 
and innuendo that the body was a shameful thing; and 
sex unmentionable. Being an earnest boy, I set out to 
translate this creed into daily life. In mediaeval times, 
I should doubtless have landed at the nearest monastery. 



THE LIFE FORCE 261 

But being a Protestant and of the present, I set up 
my own discipline. Sometimes I fasted ; sometimes I 
denied myself a particular article of food ; except dur- 
ing the brief moment of the bath, I kept my poor little 
body covered, with more than maidenly modesty. And 
every day, for years, I prayed : " God, make me all 
spirit and as little animal as possible ! " I did not know 
that wise men never pray for specific things. Rather, 
they supplicate, with Plato, " O Jove, give us what is 
good, whether we pray for it or not, and keep us from 
all evil, even though we pray for it." 

There was in this boyish asceticism something quite 
absurd, of course, but there was, also, I think, something 
rather dignified and heroic, for it was a boy's attempt 
to be logical in action. It has given me a genuine sym- 
pathy with many of the unreasonable things which ear- 
nest boys occasionally do, because I am able to divine 
the underlying idealism. The harm came later in my 
own diminished understanding of life, and the consequent 
smaller power of service. As I have said, the choice is 
not ours, — we cannot handle life with or without sex. 
The attempt to handle it, with sex left out, means that 
we handle it partially and unintelligently. That was 
precisely what happened to me, — some of my boj'S 
went astray when a timely, informing word from me, the 
older brother, might have saved them. But with my 
partial, monkish view of life, it was too delicate a mat- 
ter to mention, and so the saving word was never spoken. 
It is out of such experience as this that the opinion 
deepens that this silence of an older, informed generation 
to a younger, ignorant generation, on a matter of such 
vital and penetrating importance, is the real impropriety, 
the unforgivable crime. 



262 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

I found my own way out of this odious conspiracy of 
silence through the sane, broad gate of biological science. 
In my own youth, evolution was still a novel view point, 
and was in the very air. The most eager students of 
those days turned to biology just as those of our own 
day turn to the social sciences. The question as to 
whether acquired characteristics were or were not trans- 
mitted was still a burning one. My own geological study 
was too exacting to allow any laboratory work in biology, 
but when a later leisure allowed, I read Darwin " in the 
original," and some of Spencer and Huxley. But above 
all, I fell in with a group of young biologists, and in a 
measure shared their views and discussions. Now one 
cannot study the life of plants and animals without 
studying in detail the reproductive process and without 
realizing its immense importance to any understanding 
of organic life. Nor can one work in any science without 
realizing the essential reverence and delicacy in all scien- 
tific investigation. To a biological student, the prudery 
of silence and purposeful ignorance would be the last 
term of vulgarity. It would be simply inconceivable. 
And so, as I entered into the biological thought of my 
time, and shared a little of its bigness, I lost forever the 
vulgarity which regards the beautiful naked body as 
unseemly and immodest ; and I lost, in part, the prudery 
which hushes the necessary and helpful discussion of sex. 

But the prejudices and inhibitions of youth die hard. 
I ceased to allow myself silence, when speech seemed 
the more manly and helpful, but I did not realize for 
a moment the immense psychical importance of sex, and 
the overwhelming role which it is every day playing in 
the real drama of life. Probably I shall never be able 
quite to realize it, and to that extent shall be a partial 



THE LIFE FORCE 263 

teacher and guide when perhaps I might have been more 
catholic and helpful. And probably the boy who is to- 
day left in intentional ignorance by those who prefer 
innocence and the crimes of innocence to knowledge 
and its eventual victories will never realize the full 
psychic meaning of sex. Nature will teach him with 
frank directness what sex is on its physical side, but she 
will teach him very slowly its deeper meaning. He must 
learn that from spiritual beings, not from Nature ; and 
if they choose to keep silent, there is small chance that 
he can, with any completeness, work out for himself 
what it has taken mankind generations to discover. Bi- 
ology, as I have said, rendered us all a much-needed 
and inestimable service in sweeping away false standards 
and hesitations, and in showing us man, clean and un- 
ashamed. She silenced the ascetic prayer of my youth, 
with its pitiful, crippling fear of manly integrity, and 
taught us, instead, to pray for a perfect spirit in a per- 
fect body. She robbed the wholesome appetites and 
functions of the body of their implied questionableness, 
for she taught, without hesitation or evasion, that a 
man's thirst for woman is just as fine as his thirst for 
pure, cold water. Such doctrine as this is as far from 
lubricity as the East is from the West. 

It was a great service that biology rendered, and it 
prepared the way for that still greater service rendered 
by those very modern philosophers who have chosen to 
hurl their message at us through the quick, penetrating 
medium of the drama. Both English and Continental dra- 
matists have represented the sex question in a novel and 
illuminating way. To them, sex is the working-out of 
the Life Force, ever seeking the fulfillment of its own 
purpose, — the replenishment of the earth, — and re- 



264 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

gardless of all consequences. In this light, the sex re- 
lation between men and women takes on the dignity as 
well as the grimness of a Greek tragedy. For the Life 
Force is universal ; it pulses in each one of us, eager to 
use us, ready to slay us, mindful of nothing save the 
new generation. In Greek symbolism, the Life Force 
was Eros, and the lover was his victim and no longer a 
free agent. But in this modern apprehension of sex, 
it is man who lays his hand on Fate, and through 
knowledge, the tragedy loses its inevitableness, and 
therefore its essential quality of tragedy. An educated 
man who understands what the Life Force is, passes 
from the position of victim to that of master, for it is 
he who is the final arbiter. He may choose to cooperate 
with the Life Force, and to beget the children for whom 
it is clamoring ; or he may, with equal propriety, refuse 
his cooperation, and may, as Hindu sages have long 
taught, so far enact the master as to divert the Life 
Force from its joint physical and psychical errand, and 
transmute it into something wholly spiritual. It is in- 
credible that parent or teacher should wish his boy to 
be ignorant of such grave matters, and should prefer, 
instead, that he take up an ancient language. It must 
be that they apprehend sex only on its physical side, 
and that the lowest, as a mere indulgence. Or else, it 
must be that their own lives are so little rational that 
they are not prepared to face the clear, open eyes of a 
naked boy. 

But neither biologist nor dramatist has said the last 
word, on this complex question of sex. The child psy- 
chologist has pointed out the parallelism between ado- 
lescence and psychical instability, and the psychologist 
at large has indicated some of the relations between 



THE LIFE FORCE 265 

sex changes and our general character and mentality. 
So far, only the introductory chapter has been pub- 
lished, for only the introductory chapter has been 
worked out. The question is far from closed, and we 
must always reflect that even while we are blunderingly 
discussing the question, sex itself is not a fixed quantity, 
but like everything else in this fluid universe, is contin- 
ually evolving into something different. 

In the face of all these considerations, I should now 
feel myself a distinctly unfaithful teacher if I sent my 
boys out into the world ignorant of sex. One does not 
want an adolescent boy to think too much about such 
matters, but one does want him to think straight. A 
father or teacher who is himself frank and unashamed, 
and who has both knowledge and skill, can present the 
question of sex to his boys with such naturalness and 
dignity that their own thought will ever after be 
sweet and clean. Boys are not naturally vulgar ; they 
are only vulgar through ignorance or through bad ex- 
ample. A high-minded man, either father or teacher, 
can make vulgarity impossible to a boy, and can do 
it without making him a prude. The best approach 
to sex instruction is through a clear, biological state- 
ment of the fivefold cycle of all organic life, — birth, 
nutrition, growth, reproduction, and death. A boy 
can understand the naturalness and inevitableness of 
this cycle, for on all sides he sees plants and ani- 
mals and persons coming on to the stage of life, cross- 
ing it, and passing off. Here, as elsewhere, we move 
most wisely when we move from the simple to the com- 
plex. It is only sound pedagogy to begin with plants 
and animals. A boy's world is essentially concrete. Its . 
very limitations make him a shrewd observer and a di- 



266 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

rect thinker. You will find that he has noted many 
things in the plant and animal world which he has re- 
membered but has not understood. A brief, definite 
explanation will be welcome to him, and will enable 
him to apprehend the Life Force as it operates in plants 
and animals. When this knowledge has been achieved, 
the consideration of sex in our human world can be en- 
tered upon in the frankest, most natural-history spirit. 
But the question must not rest here, in the air. It must 
be carried home to each boy and associated concretely 
with his own bodily life. He must be taught explicitly 
what sex impulses to expect, what practices to avoid, 
what marriage means, under what conditions parent- 
hood is clean and honorable, what circumstances affect 
the welfare of offspring, what restraints are suitable 
within the marriage relation, as well as outside of it. 

At seventeen a boy ought to know what the social 
evil is, what a menace it is to him individually and to 
society at large, and what an ultimate hell the prosti- 
tute creates for herself. We are now fighting the social 
evil in every city in the land, and have organized with 
some success to suppress the white slave trade. How 
hopelessly stupid, then, for fathers and schoolmasters 
to behave as if this evil were not rooted in our midst, 
and to send their boys out into its very arms, without 
preparation and without the armor of an informed spirit. 
And it seems to me that we modern humanists are under 
special obligation to make these matters absolutely clear 
to our boys, since those very human qualities and that 
large personal attractiveness for which we have during 
seventeen years been so assiduously working, make 
these beautiful boys conspicuous marks for the wiles of 
the enemy. Once more I must point out that neither 



THE LIFE FORCE 267 

fathers nor masters nor boys have choice of a world 
with or without sex. We live in a world saturated with 
sex. Sooner or later sex knowledge will come to the 
lad, — generally sooner ; and the question, let me re- 
peat, is whether it is better to have such knowledge 
come to him from chaste, high-minded men, and to be 
accurate, complete, and helpful, or from a vulgar, wan- 
ton world, and be partial, distorted, and defiling. 

It may be wise, with less developed lads, to treat the 
sex question almost wholly as a pure natural-history 
matter, involving man along with plains and animals ; 
and it may be advisable to leave any detailed consid- 
eration of the psj^chic aspect of sex to a later time, 
when the lad is older and better prepared for such con- 
sideration. But always there should go a clear intima- 
tion of this deeper meaning. And always the boy should 
be left unashamed. He should never be allowed to think 
of the sex impulse as evil or degrading. So far as he 
thinks of it at all in any ultimate terms, he should be 
taught to see in it the basis of family life, and the 
source of much that is very precious and ennobling. 
We want him to be neither ascetic nor sensual, but a 
wholesome, normal human being. 

There is, however, one sentimentality from which we 
ought at all hazards to save a boy, and that is the 
wretched sentimentality of believing that if he fails to 
marry and beget children, he has, in some not readily 
explainable way, failed in his duty to the state or to 
society or to some would-be wife and mother, — the sort 
of nonsense that makes our more provincial legislatures 
from time to time propose a tax on bachelors, as if they 
had committed some crime, and must buy off the dis- 
coverer. In a world so full of conflicting and for the 



268 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

most part unfulfilled duties, it seems really too bad to 
invent preposterously false ones. It was George Eliot, 
I think, who some years ago proposed that on a certain 
day every one should commit suicide, and so end in one 
lurid moment an earth-drama which had long since 
reached the fifth act. Such a proposition, whether made 
seriously or not, runs counter to our Anglo-Saxon op- 
timism, and to our healthy instinct against suicide. But 
a family or even an entire people might with perfect 
propriety commit suicide by the simple and natural 
method of refusing to propagate itself ; and no moral- 
ist of any school could bring one valid argument against 
the act. In point of fact, this precise thing is happen- 
ing now. Many of the persons best qualified to beget 
children and rear them and support them are deliber- 
ately declining to cooperate with the Life Force, and 
are remaining celibate ; while among married people of 
perhaps the best type, one sees an only child, or per- 
haps none at all. And these persons have just as much 
right to their choice, as has the burly father of ten 
children to his. In these days of enlightenment, it is 
both futile and absurd to tell any woman that child- 
bearing is her natural function and duty ; or any man 
that child-begetting and family life are his. They might 
be happier, these persons, or better off or more con- 
tented or more miserable or almost anything else, if 
they were married and had children, but it is clearly 
for them to choose, and to represent the matter in any 
other way is grossly to misrepresent it. And so I think 
in our instruction of boys, and in our effort to make 
them rational, educated human beings, we ought to 
present this aspect of the life problem to them in its 
largest clearness and audacity. We ought to show them 



THE LIFE FORCE 269 

that there is no inherent nor moral necessity why chil- 
dren should be born ; why the race, beyond its good 
pleasure, should go on inhabiting the earth ; why men 
and women should yield to any of the old blind im- 
pulses through which Nature swayed them before the 
time of enlightenment. If we are to found our educa- 
tion upon religion, we must, as an essential part of this 
education, make our boys feel that the spirit of man in 
its totality is the immanent God of earth, and that as 
a sharer of this spirit, each boy must accept the im- 
mense responsibility of being God's regent, and of de- 
termining by his own enlightened will in which direction 
human destiny is to advance. We must point out to 
him that we are no longer the blind agents of the Life 
Force, but that now it is ours to say, ours to cooperate 
or refuse to cooperate — wholly ours to say whether 
mankind shall continue to accept the hospitality of 
earth. 

We are now in the midst of an immense religious 
revival in America, and it is full of gracious promise. 
It is inspired by a new spirit, not the old inert suppli- 
cation to God to act for us, and relieve us from the 
harvest of our own blunders and ignorance and sin, — 
which would be the most unfriendly thing that a god 
could do, — but the exultant, still half-frightened real- 
ization that we ourselves are in part God, that we in a 
measure permit the world to be what it is, and that it is 
we who must change it in case a growing insight shows 
it to be an evil world. 

This is not a convenient creed, and it is one, if I may 
judge from my own experience, which a man struggles 
against and tries to evade, much as a timid prince 
puts away a crown, for the responsibility is almost too 



270 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

great. But there comes a time when a man must arrive 
at some such view. If he meet life without evasion and 
hypocrisy, he must realize the presence of evil, must 
account for it, and must seek some practical way to 
overthrow it. It is more convenient to put it upon God, 
this immense burden of violence, cruelty, rapine, dis- 
honesty, treachery, suffering, disease, and accident ; but 
it only adds to our dilemma, and calls in question our 
fundamental conception of Deity. The burden can never 
be thrown off until we shoulder it, and with devotion 
and intelligence, act as God's regent for a better earth. 

I have elsewhere pointed out that the dogma of the 
Atonement is objectionable intellectually because it vi- 
olates the essential principle of cause and effect, and 
equally objectionable morally because a sin so easily 
disposed of is a sin prone to speedy repetition. As a 
matter of fact we see on all sides of us that the mem- 
bers bf those sects which go in most vehemently for the 
doctrine of free grace, fail most signally to attain right- 
eousness in their own daily lives, fail to manifest a gen- 
uine piety. It may be a staggering load for a man to 
shoulder his own sins, or a nation to shoulder its, or for 
the great world to shoulder all, but that this very diffi- 
cult thing must be done is the luminous teaching of the 
most profound religions, — what a man soweth, that 
also shall he reap, — as it is the luminous teaching of 
both science and daily experience. 

If, then, we wish a lad, at seventeen, to be a truly 
educated person, and not merely a beautiful young ani- 
mal, we must teach him that no act of life may be ex- 
plained, or justified, or excused, on the ground that it 
is natural. It may be usual or pleasurable or conven- 
ient or easier, but that is all. The very opposite act 



THE LIFE FORCE 271 

would be just as natural if we so elect, and might be 
much more logical and righteous. Nor must he ever 
allow himself to think that there is a vestige of truth 
in the common contention that " Somebody has to do 
it." This is a very grave falsehood, misleading many a 
youngster into a commonplace, inconsequentiallife, and 
many a society into mediocrity and ineffectiveness. We 
usually have two reasons for all we do, — the good rea- 
son and the real reason. If a boy is to be free and god- 
like, he must early learn to make his real reason and 
his good reason genuinely coincide, and he must have 
done with all equivocation. It is a bad thing to lie to 
others, but it is a damnable thing to lie to one's self. 

A boy must be taught to apply this fundamental 
honesty in dealing with his own sex impulses. If he 
wishes to love a maid, to marry her and to beget 
children, well and good, — that for many is the path to 
happiness; but let him recognize it as a choice, the 
opposite of which would have been equally meritorious. 
Let him at all odds save himself from the absurdity of 
thinking that this particular choice was his " duty." It 
is not necessary for the race to go on any more than it 
is necessary for drummers to keep up their senseless 
round of travel, for hangmen to hang men for pay, or 
for undertakers to bury them for profit. It is not at all 
necessary for the race to go on, — it is even conceivable 
that with equal propriety the race might end with the 
present generation. What is desirable is that a better 
race go on, and this is the great possibility in which 
education is so profoundly interested. We shall never 
get this better race by representing child-begetting and 
child-bearing as a duty, for that invites to the holy office 
■of parenthood the unfit as well as the fit. So far from 



272 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

teaching a boy that it is in any way his duty to marry, 
or allowing him to catch this heresy from the popular 
falsehood of the day, we ought specifically to teach him 
how free he is, and under what high obligation he rests 
to use this freedom. If he marries, let it be because he 
knows himself to be potentially a worthy father, and 
because he has found a worthy mate; and if children 
come, let them come under conditions which promise 
that they shall excel both father and mother. (How 
many parents, in asking special consideration for some 
unfortunate child, have said to me: "It is true: he 
ought not to have been born.") But if a lad decide not 
to marry, because he cannot hope for strong, fortunate 
children, or because he can better alone carry out what 
he knows to be his destiny, let him have no sense of 
unfulfilled duty, but rather the blessed sense of having 
chosen worthily. 

It is only in this way, through the conscious, volun- 
tary act of men and women, that eugenics can be made 
to operate, and the better race evolved. I do not know 
whether the state will ever be intelligent enough and 
masterful enough to enforce celibacy upon the diseased, 
the crippled, and the inferior, but public sentiment is 
with great propriety moving in that direction. Rudi- 
mentary justice to the unborn in saving them from a 
handicapped existence is a sufficient argument, but 
equally valid is the economic consideration for a work- 
ing world which must afterwards support these unfor- 
tunate incompetents. I do not personally believe in capi- 
tal punishment, but the permitted perpetuation of de- 
graded beings, either as individuals or nations or as 
races within nations, seems to me quite unworthy of 
our intelligence and of the immense price which we 



THE LIFE FORCE 273 

have paid for this intelligence. But we shall hardly 
reach any logical view of this whole most important 
matter or any defensible practice, so long as we con- 
tinue to sing the indiscriminate praise of fatherhood 
and motherhood. Education is not interested that a 
man shall have ten children, but that the children 
whom he does have shall be strong and beautiful and 
accomplished and good. 

I have elsewhere spoken of the desirability of hav- 
ing a boy unashamed of his naked body, for this is a 
step in leading him to regard the bodily functions with 
fine delicacy and propriety. The Greeks, as we know, 
cultivated nakedness for its beauty, its hygiene, and 
its convenience, and they found the fallen Asiatic foe 
contemptible because of his soft, white, effeminate body. 
Their own ideal was to be strong, bronzed, uncovered. 
Partly because of the severe winter climate which pre- 
vails over the upper part of the United States, but 
still more largely because of the vulgarity of the cur- 
rent attitude towards the body, the boys of a past gen- 
eration were taught on all sides to believe that naked- 
ness is improper, that when on a warm summer day 
they sneaked off to the nearest swimming-hole, and for 
a moment exulted in the freedom of naked boyhood, 
they should be very careful not to be seen, and might 
hardly mention in mixed company even the fact that 
they had been swimming. This attitude was common 
all over America, and is still pronounced in our more pro- 
vincial and less advanced communities. But happily for 
the health and beauty and genuine modesty of the 
coming generation, our best men and women are return- 
ing to the Greek sanity. This is due to many whole- 
some influences, such as our increased interest in open- 



274 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

air life, in gymnastics, in swimming, in art, in hygiene, 
our increased travel abroad, and, above all, to the grow- 
ing rationality of our unfolding human spirit. Our 
summer camps have done much to encourage this 
wholesome nakedness. My own boys wear the least 
clothing the weather allows, sometimes nothing at all, 
often merely bathing-trunks, seldom more than cotton 
running-trousers and sleeveless upper. Sun and air are 
the best possible tonics for these little growing bodies, 
but more valuble still is the attitude of mind through 
which the boy is naked but unashamed. Fifteen years 
ago, this frank treatment of the body was an experi- 
ment, and was perhaps regarded as somewhat hazard- 
ous. But the experience of the intervening years has 
more than justified the experiment. It has not solved 
the problem of self-abuse among boys, but it has les- 
sened the evil ; and the testimony of both masters and 
boys leads me to believe that in this frank exposure of 
the body we have the foundation for cleaner thinking 
and living. 

I have spoken only of the sex education of boys ; but 
in view of the far greater penalty which a woman pays 
in case of sex transgression, and her vastly larger part in 
actually bearing and nursing the child, it would seem 
even more important that girls should have complete 
and helpful instruction in all sex matters. This should 
be given by a woman, — by the mother, if she is com- 
petent, or if not, by a competent woman physician. It 
is difficult to be patient with those sentimental persons 
who would keep a girl innocent when they know that 
she may sometime pay a frightful price for her innocence. 
It is a girl's right to know, just as it is a boy's right, and 
only when she understands the meaning of sex can she 



THE LIFE FORCE 275 

meet with dignity and success her own large personal 
share in the problem. Our social usage gives the girl 
the right to accept or to reject a proffered husband. It 
should provide her with such knowledge and standards 
as will enable her to exercise this choice intelligently. 

There is one aspect of the sex question which both 
Education and the Church have shamefully neglected, 
and that is the case of illegitimate children. In the prog- 
ress of events these children have formed a considerable 
company and have numbered in their ranks many gifted 
and distinguished persons. Yet even Leonardo had con- 
stantly to meet the reproach attached to his birth. 
To allow Fate to place a child at the immense disadvan- 
tage of an irresponsible parentage, and then, ever after- 
wards, to hold it up against the child, is a cruelty quite 
unworthy of our intelligence and humanity. It has re- 
cently been proposed, in several states, to make parent- 
hood constitute a legal marriage, and to give to every 
mother and her offspring the status and privilege of 
wife and child. One must wish such humane practice to 
become universal, and meanwhile one may show one's 
own humanity by retiring from one's own personal vo- 
cabulary those terms of bitter reproach coined for in- 
nocent children born out of wedlock, and by showing 
human kindness and consideration to any such unfor- 
tunate waif who may be thrown across one's path. 

By common consent, the most primitive and powerful 
instinct is that of self-preservation ; and second to it is 
that of race-preservation. In both we have the working 
of the Life Force, the blind will to. conserve and to per- 
petuate Life. There are moments when the two instincts 
change places in the order of their imperativeness. Every 
mother, when she gives birth to her child, goes down 



276 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

voluntarily into the Valley of the Shadow ; and every 
father, true to his trust, is not only willing but fre- 
quently does sacrifice his life for what he fancies to be 
the welfare of his children. Now it seems to me that Ed- 
ucation must take cognizance of both these instincts. I 
have been trying to show that if she omits the question 
of sex from her field of inquiry, she is incomplete and 
unscientific. In the same way it seems to me that an 
educated boy of seventeen ought to be prepared to meet 
the problems of self-preservation. He has already taken 
the much larger step if he has learned intelligently to 
conserve his health, and if he has gained control over 
his spirit, and the mastery of his body, on land, in the 
water, and to a limited extent out in air. If he is really 
educated, in the proper sense of the word, he is prepared 
to meet the problems and even the emergencies of 
normal everyday existence. It is his business not only 
to come out uninjured but even strengthened. In the 
life of the quietest boy, however, some extraordinary 
event is bound to creep, some unusual demand upon his 
powers ; and in the life of a more adventurous lad, car- 
ried by high spirit and the experimental mood into sit- 
uations of danger and difficulty, such extraordinary 
events crowd thick and fast. A boy is hardly educated 
unless he is prepared in a measure to meet the unex- 
pected. Destiny has infinite resources, and in the end 
trips us all up ; but meanwhile her pitfalls, like the pos- 
sible plots of a good novel, reduce to somewhat typical 
cases and for their circumvention require about the 
same qualities ; they require that a boy shall be alert, 
adroit, resourceful ; above all, that he shall recognize 
the class to which the impending danger belongs, and 
be very quick in deciding what means are legitimate in 



THE LIFE FORCE 277 

opposing it. It seems to me very odd that we should spend 
so much time and effort and money in educating our 
boys, in making their lives both individually and socially 
of immense value, and should then give them no adequate 
instruction in the art of defending so valuable a product. 
An adventurous spirit in an active body is beset on all 
sides by dangers of all sorts. Some of these are plainly 
unescapable, since they are due to natural catastrophes 
and accidents. But others, springing from carelessness, 
or even from intended violence, may with large social 
propriety be vigorously guarded against. We are en- 
joined by our religion to turn the other cheek to the 
smiter, but such conduct, while it may or may not be 
good for us, is clearly very bad for the smiter and 
apt to induce still worse habits. A more universal mo- 
rality would teach us not only to render ideal justice as 
far as we are able, but also to demand it with equal in- 
sistence. I should regard a man as highly unfortunate 
who was obliged, under stress of any circumstance what- 
ever, to kill a fellow-man, and I should pray to be de- 
livered from such a tragic necessity ; but I should regard 
him as a moral coward if he failed to do so, in his own 
righteous defense or in the defense of the helpless and 
innocent. In a law-abiding country, we properly rely 
upon the law and its appointed ministers, and commonly 
our faith is justified by the event. But all communities 
are not law-abiding, and even in the best-ordered, there 
are times and places where law and order seem to have 
abdicated, and force, righteous or unrighteous, is left to 
decide the immediate issue. It is regrettable, but true, 
that America offers many such instances, not alone on 
the frontier, in the outlying, sparsely settled districts 
of the South and West, but as well in the very heart of 



278 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

what we have taken to be the center of our civilization. 
There are, for example, more murders every year per 
capita in America than in any other civilized country. 
This annual human sacrifice, it is said, now amounts to 
something like ten thousand persons, — men and women 
and children. The figures may be excessive, but one 
half, one quarter, one fifth, would be appalling. It is 
significant of the prevailing violence of the age that 
many of the popular magazines now display page and 
half-page advertisements of compact little revolvers 
guaranteed, in the most inexperienced hands, to send a 
bullet straight to the mark. I should not be a true edu- 
cator if I counseled the use of force in any but the most 
extreme cases, for education is the unfolding and per- 
fecting of the human spirit, not of the brute spirit ; but 
neither would I be a true man if I did not teach that 
every educated boy should be skilled in the honorable 
art of self-defense, and ready to exercise it in safeguard- 
ing his own life, and still more in safeguarding the 
threatened life or welfare of women and children and 
old men. His best weapon will always be his own strong, 
quick arm, for this can knock out the enemy without 
inflicting mortal harm. But there are moments, even 
in the lives of the gentle, when only a knowledge and 
a grave willingness to use accessory weapons will save 
the day and make reason and the will of God prevail. 
It is a high and painful responsibility to resist evil, but 
I believe that every man of us, pledged to the cause of 
righteousness, should be prepared to do this, quickly 
and effectively, not in anger, but mercifully, as God's 
regent on earth. And I am disposed to believe that when 
the children of darkness find that the children of light 
may ever be depended upon to resist evil with equal or 



THE LIFE FORCE 279 

even greater skill than that with which the evil is thrust 
forward, there will be a diminishing amount of evil to 
resist. Modern life is still full of disagreeable possibil- 
ities which an educated lad must be prepared to meet and 
frustrate. You never know what a drunken man will do, or 
an insane person, or a desperado. Even a runaway horse, 
or a mad dog, or an infuriated bull, or a menagerie amuck 
may menace a life, and if no skilled arm intervene, make 
desolate for years some hitherto happy home. It all hap- 
pens in a moment, and the preventive, to be effective, 
must be administered with equal speed. And there are 
smaller evils which no true man may permit in his pres- 
ence, and still preserve his self-respect, — thefts, depre- 
dations, injuries, insults, — and he may especially not 
permit them if they are offered to others whose very 
defenselessness constitutes a claim upon his valor. Our 
educators are not, as a class, a very robust lot, not par- 
ticularly strong in the art of self-defense, and not par- 
ticularly redoubtable when it comes to defending others. 
Unless it is pointed out to them, they would not be apt 
to discover that robustness and the knightly virtues are 
a more vital part of the curriculum of education than 
the specific form of erudition which they are by habit 
prepared to supply ; and yet it seems to me that until 
the cause of righteousness is in stronger hands than 
it is at present, we can hardly expect it with any degree 
of thoroughness to prevail. 

I have spoken of self-defense as if it were an art 
solely needed to circumvent accidental and intentional 
violence, but in reality this office, though obvious, is only 
a small part of its mission. There is a violence vastly 
more fatal which until very recently was neither acci- 
dental nor intentional, but merely unconscious. It is 



280 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

the violence which has robbed the working classes of so 
much of their one-time strength and manliness, the vio- 
lence of industrial exploitation. It shows itself in a 
multitude of forms, in over-hard tasks, in over-long 
hours, in bad air, in deficient sunshine, in dull employ- 
ment, in unsanitary houses, in insufficient clothing, in 
poor food, in scant rest. It is a situation which has 
grown up with our industrial development and for 
which society alone is responsible. No one class is to 
blame, neither working-men nor the empk^ers of work- 
ing-men. But it is nevertheless a fatal form of violence, 
which both classes must combat with intelligence and 
resolution. Legislation is doing its utmost' to bring 
about a better state of things, and to institute what 
may be called a social self-preservation. It works slowly, 
but in the aggregate accomplishes much. This has been 
notably the case in the legislation for child welfare. 
There has never been a time in America when humane 
persons did not deprecate premature child labor, but it 
has only been within the last dozen years that the issue 
has become a burning one. But there is always a dis- 
tinct educational loss when you or society do for per- 
sons the welfare work which with better fundamental 
ideas in their heads they would have been prompted to 
do for themselves. Education, broadly conceived, should 
include self-preservation, should include resistance to 
industrial violence quite as much as to the violence of 
intentional marauders, should instill into children and 
boys and lads the fundamental idea that they may en- 
gage in no work, unless it be one of necessary mercy, 
which involves loss of integrity to their spirit, to their 
body, to their intellectual faculties. We hear much of 
the sacred rights of property. We want now to preach, 



THE LIFE FORCE 281 

we parents and teachers, the sacred rights of persons. 
We want to make it an essential part of education, 
preaching it not so much to the captains of industry, 
who are a bit deaf by reason of profit, as to the young 
people themselves starting out upon the bread-and- 
butter journey of the workaday world. They must be 
taught self-defense and the courage to practice it. They 
lack the essentials of the most elementary education if 
they have not learned to conserve their own lives, and 
to resist all industrial exploitation which is destructive 
or even harmful. I would not for one moment obscure 
the moral responsibility of the profit-taker, the em- 
ployer. His intelligence lays him under the greater ob- 
ligation. But I do not look for any notable results until 
the Life Force, seeking to conserve life as well as to 
perpetuate it, finds adequate expression in a strength- 
ened instinct of se£f-preservation. Nature herself is no- 
toriously wasteful of life. She spawns a million crea- 
tures in order that one may survive. And she is, to all 
appearances, quite as ruthless in her dealing with man- 
kind. But each year man himself becomes more and more 
a determining factor, and may decline to allow himself, 
too early, to be cast aside. Along with the injunction 
against murder, we must engrave an equally binding 
injunction against permitting one's self to be murdered. 
To be a man one must assume the prerogatives of a 
man, and may not throw upon others the duties which 
belong to one's self. 

We may say that in his divine bounty God gave to 
man the task of creating a better world. One can im- 
agine no more fascinating task. But to fulfill it, man 
must accept with mixed humility and audacity this 
immense, disturbing principle of human responsibility. 



XII 

THE WAKDERJAHR 

It is the custom in many well-to-do and ambitious 
families to send a boy directly from the high school to 
college ; in less well-to-do and ambitious families, to 
send him directly to work. Such a custom is not neces- 
sarily wise. Bearing in mind that education is prima- 
rily a matter of the spirit and the body, we must allow 
the world and actual experience to have an effective 
hand. At seventeen, a boy is still a bit too young to go 
to college with the largest profit. Having been under 
continuous formal training for three years, and fairly 
persistent guidance for the previous fourteen years, the 
time is ripe for a different discipline. It is time for the 
boy to look at life from a less provincial and less self- 
centered angle. 

When the family circumstances permit, I do not 
know of a better way for the boy to spend his eighteenth 
year than in making a journey around the world. Boys 
of this age who go to Europe for a summer, or even 
for a year, often get little enough out of the experience, 
because they commonly go with the dominant idea that 
they are to have " a good time." As a result, they gen- 
erally misspend the year, and come home not so well 
off as when they went away. They have been allowed 
prematurely to lead, when they should have been asked 
intelligently to follow. As a result, they too often miss 
the whole point of what might have been a great spir- 
itual adventure. It is a part of our vulgar national 



THE WANDERJAHR 283 

extravagance so to waste youth and money and oppor- 
tunity. If a boy were sent around the world, and al- 
lowed to travel in this same self-indulgent spirit, missing 
the great throbbing world-pageant in order to see some 
very minor side-shows, the journey would be anything 
but profitable. I am only recommending the world-tour 
in case it is to be taken seriously as a part of a careful 
educational scheme, and in suitable company. An alert, 
red-blooded lad of seventeen could hardly fail to have 
" a good time " on such an adventure as this, — indeed, 
there would be something sadly amiss about him if he 
did fail, — but there are as many ways of having a good 
time as there are sorts of boys to have them. The mere 
adventure of the thing, on steamer, railway train, and 
gondola, in carriage, bullock cart, and jinricksha, on 
horse, camel, and elephant, to say nothing of the seven 
seas and the great mountains, is enough to stir a boy's 
blood to enthusiasm. He can have a wonderfully good 
time, and still bring home much else from the journey. 
The first object of such an experience is to help the 
boy over his provincialism, to destroy all contempt and 
unfriendliness for the rest of the world, as foreigners, 
and to know them as men like ourselves, and in some 
respects, perhaps, better than ourselves. Of course, if 
a boy goes about measuring everything with his home 
yardstick, disdainful of everything different, just be- 
cause it is different, he would better remain at home. 
He must be taught to note the differences, and to weigh 
their merits in relation to their surroundings. A thing 
may be very good in India which would be quite out of 
place in Texas. I recall, for example, the irrigation in 
southern India. It seemed to me hopelessly primitive, 
— a shallow well, a leather bucket, a rope, a windlass, 



284 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

a pair of soft-eyed oxen, a boy or an old man as driver. 
But an English engineer whom I met at the technical 
school in Madura, after confessing to a similar crudity 
of judgment on his first arrival, went on to explain that 
in many instances he had found the economic advantage 
to rest with the simple native appliances, — the leather 
bucket, in spite of its greater first cost, was the cheaper 
in the end, for it withstood the marked changes in heat 
and cold, moisture and dryness, better than either metal 
or wood, while, in the absence of both fuel and skilled 
mechanics, the oxen were a cheaper motive-power than 
steam. To get a boy over his parochialism is to intro- 
duce into his judgments this element of relativity and 
proportion. 

In the company of the right sort of man, a boy will 
grow modest and appreciative, and will learn to value the 
things that are excellent regardless of national bound- 
aries. If he listens to the stories of Japanese heroism 
and Chinese faithfulness and Indian devotion, he must 
lose forever that contemptuous spirit in which the West 
is prone to regard the East. He must feel in his heart 
a growing sense of brotherhood. When he meets these 
people face to face in their own homes, when he sees 
their habitual courtesy, and notes the sweet reasonable- 
ness and dignity with which they meet toil and suffer- 
ing, he must, if he have a heart in him, feel abashed 
and chastened. 

When I was at the beautiful Lake of Chuzenji, a 
young poet had just committed suicide by jumping over 
the waterfall of Kegon. It was a particularly evil thing 
to do, for his mother was a widow, and very poor, and 
he was her only support. The old woman came in sor- 
row to the little tea-house at the foot of the waterfall, 



THE WANDERJAHR 285 

to receive the body of her dead son. Here she met with 
the most touching courtesy. When she left, the tea- 
house people would take no payment from her, — she 
had been, they said, the guest of the honorable water- 
fall. 

To make the world-journey profitable, our lad of sev- 
enteen must meet the people themselves, must, if possi- 
ble, speak their language, must enter into their lives, 
and must judge them at their best, not at their worst. He 
must especially avoid other tourists, either from Amer- 
ica or Europe, and in general must fight shy of foreign 
residents. They could, of course, give him much infor- 
mation, but little of it would be trustworthy, and the 
boy would be very sure to meet a bewildering lot of 
prejudice. The only safe course is to take everything at 
first-hand, to search habitually for the facts in the case, 
rather than to accept a foreign comment which rests 
too frequently upon something much less substantial 
than fact. It is mortifying, but true, that one sees the 
worst side of Japan in the treaty ports, where the natives 
have come into closest contact with our so-called Chris- 
tian civilization ; and in India, the Hindu is best where 
he has guarded his own integrity, and refused to be 
anglicized. If the boy can take with him sympathy, 
daily courtesy, and the scientific spirit, he will come 
home with a full heart, he will be a cosmopolite in the 
best sense of the word, and he will be forever averse 
to all the petty, miserable barriers which now divide 
the nations of the world, to war and false patriotism and 
protective tariffs and exclusions and discriminations of 
every sort. I hold this spiritual result, this genuine sense 
of human solidarity, to be the most notable harvest of 
such a world-journey. But there are other substantial 



286 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

gains. It is geography and current history, art and 
architecture, religion and economics, vivid and at first- 
hand. To an open-eyed boy, prompted by the older in- 
telligence at his side, the journey is a most impressive 
lesson in human performance. It is the concrete showing 
of what men have done, and are now doing. An imag- 
inative lad cannot escape the thrill of such an experi- 
ence, of such a world-wide pageantry of achievement. 
Nor can he escape its challenge. In the face of all this 
immense activity of the past and of the present, he must 
inevitably put the question to himself, What can I dot 
and that is precisely the question we desire of him. On 
all sides he will see men working and women working, 
— sometimes, alas, children working, — and he will be 
forced to realize that not only must this great w r ealth 
of past achievement, and the current wealth of the 
market, but also his own daily share of comfort, — the 
bed he sleeps in, the roof over his head, the morning 
bath, the clothes he wears, the food he puts into his 
mouth, the equipment of travel, the whole apparatus of 
culture, — must all finally be expressed in terms of 
human toil. Some man or woman or child has produced 
everything there is, and he, strong, able-bodied, dexter- 
ous, has not yet personally paid for his share of this 
bounty. Illuminated by the human point of view, it is 
a tremendous lesson. The man or boy who thus reads 
this story of achievement will feel a haunting discon- 
tent until he, too, has made his proper contribution, 
generous in proportion to his strength, excellent in pro- 
portion to his skill. 

I may seem to have been putting the cart before the 
horse in thus naming the results of a journey before 
outlining the journey itself; but then if one does not 



THE WANDERJAHR 287 

value the enterprise, if one has thought of it all along 
as an idle adventure of the idle rich, rather than as a 
serious quest of the spirit, one cannot easily regard the 
project as an integral part of an educational scheme, or 
throw any great enthusiasm into carrying it out. Many 
are deterred from even considering the journey because 
they do not understand the immense value of it ; and 
many more because of what they suppose to be the too- 
great expense. I should like to remove both obstacles. 
My own journey covered the academic year of nine 
months, and cost less than living very modestly for the 
same length of time in the town of Concord, Massachu- 
setts. My brother and I made the journey eight years 
ago. He was just the right age, seventeen, and I had 
been twenty-eight for several years. Aside from what 
we spent on clothing and our art collection, the actual 
expense of the journey was not over fifteen hundred dol- 
lars apiece from the western door of our house back to the 
eastern door. The increased cost of living being a sad 
reality, the journey would doubtless cost somewhat more 
at present, but stripped of all unnecessary expense, it 
could still be done, I think, with entire comfort, for two 
thousand. If the lad could properly spend a few hun- 
dred more for well-selected objects of beauty, — prints, 
bronzes, chests, embroideries, pottery, lanterns, photo- 
graphs, and the like, — they would be, if I may judge 
from my own experience, possessions of abiding charm. 
In starting out on such a journey, the question of 
whether one shall move with the main current of travel, 
to the east, or against the current, to the west, is purely 
a matter of choice. There is something to be said in 
favor of either decision. We chose to go to the west, 
setting out early in September. This brought us to Japan, 



288 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

in the chrysanthemum and maple-viewing season instead 
of in the spring, at the time of the cherry blossoms. 
I think that the decision was wise, but had we gone to 
the east, I should probably have thought the same thing. 
It is not my intention to describe in any detail this won- 
derful journey, for that would easily take a book, and 
would be a quite unnecessary addition to our already vo- 
luminous literature of travel. I propose only to outline the 
route, and to name a few significant incidents. It speaks 
volumes for the certainties of modern travel that a man 
who wished to go with us, but who wished still more to 
journey to the east, calculated that we ought to meet at 
Benares, in the heart of India. In reality, we reached 
there one day, and he turned up on the following morn- 
ing! I may also mention in this connection that after 
we got home, my brother and I estimated that we had 
spent sixty-five nights on a boat, and in all that time 
we did not have a single storm. Nor were we ship- 
wrecked once, except most mildly in the Suez Canal, 
when the Persia stuck her nose into the sand at the 
sharp bend near El-Ferdan, and we lost nearly a day. 
We suffered one tiresome quarantine of eight days at 
Kandy, in Ceylon, where my brother inconsiderately 
developed chicken-pox. But on the whole we were so 
comfortable, so well, so secure, so happy, so little in- 
convenienced in any way that there were times when 
the New England part of my conscience rather up- 
braided me and suggested that for so great an ad- 
venture we were hardly pajdng a decent price. The 
advantage seemed all on our side. 

The world-journey for us really began at Montreal, 
where we started west over the Canadian Pacific. It 
was rather dull as far out as Calgary, but after that the 



THE WANDERJAHR 289 

-week spent in the mountains, in crossing the Kockies, 
the Selkirks, and the Coast Kange, and in stopping over 
a night each at Banff, Lake Louise, and Glacier, was 
about as fine as anything we had on the whole journey. It 
was excelled by only one thing in India, — the Hima- 
layas as seen from Darjeeling ; by one thing in Japan, 
— Fuji-yama, from the Pass of the Eighteen Provinces ; 
by one thing in Europe, — the country around my Gene- 
vois chateau, in the blossoming time of May ; and by one 
thing in America, — the home-coming. Eight years ago, 
travel in Canada was more comfortable and more secure 
than in the United States, and we were not surprised, 
therefore, to find many Europeans on their way to Japan 
and India, but we were surprised to discover that some 
of them had never thought it worth while to cross the 
line and catch a glimpse of the States. It came to us 
as something of a shock. 

At the Pacific, there is choice of several routes to 
Japan. The Empress steamers, sailing from Vancouver, 
are said to be the best, and I believe they are still the 
quickest, making Yokohama in about ten days. But 
they go shiveringly near the Arctic Circle, and in the 
cabins the prevailing temperatures are better calcu- 
lated, it is said, to please a Briton than an American, 
This, and the fact that we wanted to see Honolulu, 
sent us down to San Francisco, and the Japanese Line. 
On these steamers, the commander is an Englishman, 
but all the other officers, the crew and the stewards, are 
Japanese. It is an experience in silence to cross on such 
a boat. The little brown people go about their business 
with the precision of machines aiid the noiselessness of 
a pincushion. The only sounds, aside from the high- 
pitched American voices and the inopportune singing 



290 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

of groups of missionaries, were the ship's bells, and from 
time to time the startling boom of the fire-alarm. The 
fire-drills were a regular part of the daily routine, and 
came, unexpectedly, at any moment. The Pacific is tre- 
mendously, almost hideously, lonely. We ploughed along 
for days without sighting a craft of any sort, and we 
came to realize the wisdom of these disturbing drills, 
for a burning, abandoned ship in mid-Pacific, even if all 
got off safely in little boats, would probably be followed 
by a tragedy not pleasant to contemplate. 

Life on the Pacific is quite unlike any other experi- 
ence. I had never loved the sea until I came to cross 
the Pacific. The seventeen days of the crossing were 
none too long. I understood why Robert Louis Steven- 
son took to cruising in the South seas, as the one 
possible road to health. The commander of the Hong- 
Kong Maru kept below 30°, and so out of the storm 
area. One sunny day succeeded another ; each moonlight 
night seemed more beautiful than the last. The most 
obstreperous nerves were quieted, and the most active 
conscience lulled to sleep. We could have gone on indefi- 
nitely, sailing over a shimmering sea, which offered, 
it is true, nothing but monotony, nothing but gently 
swelling water and illimitable sky and undiscouraged 
sunshine and the recurrent mystery of night, but which 
gave a sense of immensity and of peace, and late each 
afternoon the subdued excitement of sailing over liquid 
gold towards the glory of a dying sun. These are the 
real schoolmasters for an alert, impressionable lad of 
seventeen, — the great mountains we had crossed, the 
boundless sea, the infinite, outstretched sky, the sun and 
moon and stars, — better far than anything we can give 
him indoors. 



THE WANDERJAHR 291 

The ship's company, if it is not ungracious to say it, 
was less delightful than one could have wished. Most 
of the cabin passengers were missionaries. There were, 
of course, pleasant exceptions, but in the majority of 
cases, it seemed fatuous in the extreme to send them 
tinkering with anything so precious and so delicate as 
a human soul; I found myself honestly wondering how 
these people, had they remained at home, could have 
managed to make a living. But here they were, bent 
upon their errand of theoretical good will and actual 
potential harm, and supported by poor people at home 
who gave of their scanty means in the fond belief that 
they were serving God. I was once in a postal sub- 
station in the city of Washington, vainly trying to 
buy some stamps. The lady ahead of me unfortunately 
knew the clerk, and entered into such a lengthy conver- 
sation with him that finally I had to leave and forego 
my purchase. While I was still hopeful of success, how- 
ever, I could not help overhearing the conversation. 
The lady was telling of a common friend who had gone 
out to Japan as a missionary and had labored valiantly 
against the Enemy of Souls for two long years. The lis- 
tening clerk put the very practical question as to 
whether these labors had led to any conversions. The 
lady admitted regretfully that they had not, but added 
with returning cheerfulness that the missionary hoped 
eventually to make several. Then, in a burst of triumph, 
she recalled one achievement, that when he went to Ja- 
pan, the men and women bathed together, and that now, 
by law, they were obliged to bathe separately. As this 
common bathing was quite free from scandal, our mis- 
sionary's small share in bringing about the change 
seemed a pitiable harvest for two years' work conducted 



292 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

at some one else's expense; and additionally pitiable 
when one pictured the lonely wife who probably shared 
his exile, and the little people who were being badly, 
ruinously brought up in order that their father might 
confuse the soul of a people whom he did not under- 
stand. 

At Kioto, the beautiful, I met an engaging young 
lady, who would, I think, have been successful in Amer- 
ica, — in Japan she was restless and discontented. She 
was the daughter of the oldest missionaries in Kobe, 
and explained at great length to my brother and me 
how worthless the Japanese were, and how they 
imposed upon her father and mother on every possible 
occasion. It was different, she said, with her brother 
and herself. They never got imposed on, for they 
treated the people like the dirt under their feet ! (I am 
quoting her exact words.) These experiences are also 
educative. Being myself a world-religionist, and believ- 
ing in the immense sanctity of racial spiritual life, I 
naturally disbelieve in all proselyting effort. But even 
if I did sanction such spiritual intrusions, I should feel, 
from what I have seen of missionaries' children in this 
country and afield, that a success far greater than any 
we seem likely to achieve would be more than offset by 
the sacrifice of the children. 

It was our limited good fortune to have about eigh- 
teen hours at Honolulu, the length of the steamer's 
call. But one really ought to stop over a boat, and have 
at least a week on the island. We made the most of 
our short stay, sleeping on the steamer, but dining and 
breakfasting on shore, and exploring as much of the 
city and its surroundings as the time allowed. There is 
a dominant luxury at Honolulu, the same luxury that 



THE WANDERJAHR 293 

one finds at all well-situated tropical places, and that is 
the generous, uninterrupted fresh air. On every side 
there were open doors and open windows, and the gen- 
tle movement of delicious, uncontaminated fresh air. 
When I think of Honolulu, I involuntarily take a long 
breath, and see before me splashes of sunshine. It is a 
sophisticated place, but still interlayered with the prim- 
itive. On a pleasant side street in the residence section, 
we noticed a piano-box buggy and in it two lads of 
about twelve. They were handsome, brown little fel- 
lows, and were incommoded by only one garment, a 
pair of long white trousers. They looked comfortable 
and usual, but a trifle incongruous in anything so mod- 
ern and so ugly as a piano-box buggy. One finds this 
same juxtaposition of old and new on all sides; and 
judging from the articles recently published, one would 
now find a similar incongruity of spiritual ideals, — 
old forms of social injustice face to face with our newer 
standards of social righteousness. 

A short distance out from Honolulu, the steamer 
crosses the International Meridian, where the official 
clay of the world begins. As we were traveling to the 
west, we lost a day. We went to sleep, if I remember 
rightly, on Tuesday evening and got up on Thursday 
morning. Had we been going to the east, we should, of 
course, have gained a day, going to bed on Tuesday 
evening, and getting up on Tuesday morning. Simple as 
it is, the experience is impressive. One gains a genuine 
sense of these big arrangements of time and space where 
before one had merely an intellectual apprehension. It 
may be boyish to require so literal an experience, but 
I confess that ever since our world-journey I have felt 
myself more convincingly orientated with respect to the 



294 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

planet earth, and bear in my thought a more compan- 
ionable and intimate image. 

When the weather is clear, the first glimpse of Ja- 
pan is the outline of her great snow-covered volcano, 
Fuji-yama. It is symbolic of Japan, — of her religion 
as well as of her art. During the short summer season 
when ascents are possible, at least ten thousand pilgrims 
climb the mountain. They do it, not as a mere exercise 
in mountain-climbing, but as a religious act, as a pil- 
grimage to the most exalted of Shinto shrines. They 
go to hold high converse with the gods. In the art of 
Japan, Fuji-yama figures with ever-recurrent variety. 
Her great artists, as well as her minor ones, have rep- 
resented the sacred mountain in every possible light, 
at every season of the year, with almost every conceiv- 
able variety of foreground, until now her characteristic 
outline is familiar to the whole civilized world. For us 
the picture had come true and we were privileged to 
cross the actual foreground. 

Some years before I went to Japan, an artist friend 
was looking with me at some prints by Hiroshige which 
I had pinned up on my walls. They meant little to me 
at that time, and I had always supposed the subjects 
to be imaginative. It gave me a curious jolt when my 
friend pointed to one of them and said, " Ah, that is 
in Tokio, and just over the hill, beyond the bridge, is 
where Mr. Fenollosa lives." 

In reality, the most famous of these prints represent 
actual scenes, taken mostly from the old highroad, the 
Tokaido, which joins Tokio and Kioto, the former cap- 
ital of the Shoguns and the historic capital of the Em- 
perors. It was new to me, and may be to some readers, 
that these capitals of the new Japan and of the old are 



THE WANDERJAHR 295 

really the same word, with a simple rearrangement of 
the syllables, — To-kio and Kio-to. The first jinricksha 
ride we took, after landing from the steamer, was along 
that slanting road near Yokohama, which is the scene 
of one of Hiroshige's loveliest prints. We hardly saw 
a group of natives that might not have been a print by 
Hokusai suddenly put into motion. The lovely women 
of Haronobu and the other painters of type-portraits 
were not so clearly in evidence, for the dress was gayer 
then than is now sanctioned by decorous Japanese soci- 
ety; but the gentle faces were much the same, and the 
beautiful old prints no longer seemed unreal and imag- 
inative. It was difficult to realize that we were moving 
in a twentieth-century world and not in a timeless 
world of line and color. For Japan, outside of Tokio 
and the treaty ports, is precisely what it has been pic- 
tured, the most essentially sesthetic corner of the 

globe. The sense of beauty, an ardent love of the beau- 
tiful, and the instinct to reproduce it, are in the Japan- 
ese blood. Smitten by the commercial spirit, the people 
now manufacture many articles which are not beautiful, 
which are indeed distinctly and painfully ugly, but they 
do not desecrate their own homes with them, — they 
sell them to Americans and Europeans. It is curious 
that when the Japanese dress in European style, they 
do it badly, even absurdly. Men who were immaculate 
in native dress appeared in shabby, shiny frock coats 
and disreputable bowlers without any apparent sense of 
unfitness. When dress-suits first thrust their ugliness 
upon Japan, Mr. Fenollosa told us that the Japanese 
gentlemen wore them without the customary linen, and 
the effect was very droll. It is the same with their 
houses. Nearly every progressive and well-to-do Japan- 



296 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

ese gentleman has what he is pleased to call his Euro- 
pean drawing-room, and those we saw were ugly beyond 
words. It is true that most of the furniture was made 
in Germany and was of an inferior grade. The Japan- 
ese had to take what the Tokio and Yokohama market 
afforded. But the explanation was more profound than 
this, and was a part of our education. That men who 
dressed in perfect taste in native garments, and whose 
lovely houses and gardens were faultless in every detail, 
should go so signally to pieces when they ventured out- 
side their own aesthetic tradition, brought home to us 
anew the realization that no art can ever spring new- 
born from any individual or nation, but must result 
from a long and faithful quest of beauty covering many 
generations. Art, in a word, must be a tradition, a her- 
itage, and must have back of it centuries of eager effort. 
The Japanese have this, and in their own field they 
have achieved the wonderful beauty of line and color 
for which they have for so many generations been work- 
ing. But when they step outside of this tradition, they 
are entirely bewildered, and though we may properly 
call them the aesthetic successors of the Greeks, they 
nevertheless commit atrocities beyond our own power 
of offending. This came to me as something of a reve- 
lation, and I have pondered over it long and often. 

We saw a school of modern painting at Uyeno Park 
in Tokio where native artists were taught to paint in 
Western style. The exhibition of their work was an 
occasion for laughter and for tears, but mostly for tears. 
Mr. Okakura has done much for his country, but his 
largest service has been his insistence that Japan should 
return in art to her own ideals and traditions and should 
not lightly throw over the aesthetic heritage of centuries 



THE WANDERJAHR 297 

of effort and achievement. There are many fields of 
endeavor in which a man may, with large hope of suc- 
cess, strike out for himself, and along new and untried 
paths achieve service and distinction. This is notably 
true in science, in industry, and in agriculture. But 
it is not true in art. Here there is a racial psychology 
to which the artist must appeal, or, failing to appeal, 
may hope to please no one but himself. 

And yet, curiously, while one nation may not success- 
fully imitate the art of another nation, she may, if both 
are on a high plane of development, learn to appreciate 
it. It is notable that, in her superb achievement in line 
and color — in prints, in costume, in acting, in temple 
architecture, in bronze, in pottery, in embroidery, in 
lacquer-work, in carving, and in landscape gardening 
— Japan has been able to appeal not only to her own 
people, but also to the cultivated taste of Europe and 
America. The best art criticism of the world admits 
Japanese preeminence in these lines, and suggests the 
thought that she may here have transcended the bounds 
of purely racial tradition, and laid hold of universal 
aesthetic principles. I am not forgetting that the exist- 
ence of such principles is still a matter of dispute, but 
I confess personally to have taken sides. 

The literature and music of Japan have not attained 
a similar catholicity. As far as a stranger may judge, 
her literature has two great themes, the apotheosis of 
nature and the praise of sacrifice. But in neither case 
does Japan seem to touch the universal chord. Her na- 
ture literature, if it be fairly represented by such trans- 
lations as are offered by way of example, strikes a 
Western mind as singularly meager and inadequate, 
for it adds little of the mood and temperament of the 



298 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

writer, and reports only in mixed rhapsody and recital 
the elements in nature which might better be transcribed 
in line and color. In a word, it seems quite devoid of 
the spiritual charm of our English nature literature. 
Sacrifice has a universal appeal, but the Japanese con- 
ception of sacrifice seems to turn upon the willingness 
to give up life upon what seems to us insufficient mo- 
tive, such as the famous story of the Forty Ronins, and 
similar tales of heroism. The topic is universal, but the 
appeal in this case is not. Nor does Japanese music 
have any charm for Western ears. The most popular 
instrument, the samisen, is feeble and monotonous to a 
degree. It is like a banjo, badly played and persisted 
in leagues beyond any possible encore. The orchestral 
music, as one hears it in the theater, is frankly distress- 
ing. It must, of course, be a source of pleasure to na- 
tive ears, and the question naturally arises as to whether 
we might not, by proper cultivation, come to appreciate 
Japanese music just as we have learned to appreciate 
Japanese line and color work. But music, though one 
of the subtlest and most spiritual of the fine arts, — 
the art form in the cult of the Spirit, — is susceptible 
of very strict mathematical analysis, and such an anal- 
ysis shows that our modern Western music is a product 
far in advance of anything evolved in Japan, or even 
in Greece. By careful study, we might come to under- 
stand Japanese music, but to prefer it to our own, or 
even perhaps to enjoy it at all, would mean a musical 
retrogression. After listening to a Beethoven symphony, 
Mr. Okakura once said to a companion, " This is per- 
haps the only art in which the West has gone farther 
than the East." 

The Japanese spirit is at its best in line and color, 



THE WANDERJAHR 299 

in the things that appeal to the eye. Our own concep- 
tion of the artist is a man with eyes set far apart. In 
Japan all eyes are set far apart, and one might almost 
say that all are artists. As we came to know Japan, our 
sense of the omnipotence of tradition deepened, and we 
slowly realized that in spite of her aesthetic preemi- 
nence, Japan, even in art, has originated nothing, but 
has borrowed everything. The sources of Japanese art 
are across the water, in China. In Japan, everything 
that is correct, or " classical," is plainly Chinese. In 
some things, Japan has notably outdistanced her teacher, 
but in other lines, as in jade-carving and in pottery, she 
has not equaled her, — in no case, I believe, has she 
broken with her. I am not reciting these well-known 
facts in disparagement of Japanese art, for it seems to 
me, in point of absolute refinement, quite the best thing 
that the world has to offer ; but only in confirmation of 
that discovery which so touched our own spirit, the 
discovery of the necessity for race effort, and the po- 
tency of race tradition. It is a lesson which we of the 
New World especially need to lay to heart. 

We had only three months in Japan, and so we spent 
them, as persons of limited means ought, upon a few 
choice things, rather than superficially, upon many 
things. We did not attempt to " do " Japan. Out of our 
limited purse of days, we gave a fortnight to Tokio ; 
nine days to the temples of the Tokagawa Shoguns 
and the solemn cryptomeria forests at Nikko ; one whole 
wonderful month to Kioto, the beautiful, the Firenze 
of Japan ; and the rest of the time to Kamakura, to 
Miyonoshita, to Hakone, to Myojima, to Enoshima, to 
Nagoya, to Nara, to Kobe, to Osaka, — to places that 
merited a week or even a month each, and got only a few 



300 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

days or a few hours. Letters of introduction are very 
useful in Japan, as elsewhere, for they open the doors 
to many pleasant experiences, to glimpses of home life, 
to ceremonial dinners, to private collections, to native 
industries and schools. But these letters would better 
be to Japanese than to expatiated Americans, for, as I 
have pointed out, the latter are apt to be malcontents 
and criers-down. There are, of course, shabby sides to 
Japanese life, and the traveler who asks direct ques- 
tions, or goes shopping, will discover at least two of 
them. He will learn that as a rule the Japanese do not 
tell the truth, and that the shopkeepers may be trusted 
to misrepresent. One incident will illustrate both qual- 
ities. When we first reached Tokio, and my ignorance 
of Japanese wares and ways was still profound, I ven- 
tured to buy a large piece of embroidery, about the size 
of an ordinary door, and valued it the more because the 
shopkeeper, on being questioned, assured me that it was 
very old. I pinned it up on the wall of my room. A 
Japanese gentleman called upon me shortly afterwards 
and could hardly avoid noticing my newly acquired treas- 
ure. As he had been at one time the Director of the 
Imperial Museum, and was a known authority on art, I 
seized the opportunity to ask his opinion of the em- 
broidery and its age. He examined it with every show 
of seriousness, and pronounced it very pretty and very 
old. Later, I discovered, of course, that it was only mod- 
erately pretty and very new. When I asked an expe- 
rienced countryman for an explanation, the reply was 
that my kind visitor had lied to me for two reasons. In 
the first place, he easily saw that I much wanted to be- 
lieve my treasure old, and so it had seemed to him more 
courteous to say that it was old ; and in the second 



THE WANDERJAHR 301 

place, he did not wish me, as a serious traveler, who 
might report his impressions, to believe that the Japan- 
ese would lie, for profit. In general, I found that the 
upper-class Japanese will lie with as little hesitation as 
a conscientious New Englander shows in expressing a 
disagreeable truth ; but they do it to further what they 
believe to be your greater pleasure, and not for petty 
ends of their own ; it is merely a part of the national 
etiquette. The shopkeepers lie for precisely the same 
reason that shopkeepers in other parts of the world do, 
— to make the readier sale. 

Every prudent collector soon learns to bear in mind 
that the Japanese are singularly expert in all manner 
of forgeries. They have produced iron said pots, for 
example, bearing the signature of old masters, so clev- 
erly done as to deceive the Japanese themselves. Mod- 
ern prints are put out with every sign of age and 
genuineness, — worm-holes, discolorations, damage, im- 
perfections. Even during the lifetime of a popular artist, 
forged examples of his work are sold in not too-near 
markets. But reprehensible as these things are, they are 
not confined to the Far East, and they do not alter the 
fact that both original and copy are objects of real and 
abiding beauty. 

Not all Japanese shopping is vulgar. It has its deli- 
cacies. Many a proprietor of some small curio-shop has 
a passion for beauty quite equal to your own. He 
hoards his most precious wares, not even deigning to 
display them to any but appreciative eyes. It is not 
until you have given evidence of taste that the best 
things are brought forward. You must go twice, some- 
times three times to a shop before you are allowed to 
see the very best, and meanwhile you must affect entire 



302 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

indifference to the allurement of the second-best. But 
neither is this peculiar to Japan. In buying horses, I 
also find it discreet to pass over the animals which the 
dealer most urges upon my attention, and to devote my- 
self to the sounder stock which he keeps in the back- 
ground. 

But a Japanese auction is the height of delicacy. 
While we were living in Kioto, a handsome Japanese 
boy presented himself one morning at our hotel, with a 
note asking if it would not interest us to attend an auc- 
tion then in progress. The note was from an American, 
whom we had not met, but who had come to know of 
our being in the city and had offered himself as guide. 
We were soon in his company and en route. We found 
a sizable building which was or had been a private 
dwelling. Now the rooms were scantily filled with vari- 
ous beautiful objects, and Japanese collectors were 
quietly moving from room to room. What struck us 
most was the silence, — no one extolled the wares, no 
one invited a bid. In each room a silent clerk sat on 
the floor warming his fingers over an hibachi and sip- 
ping his cup of clear, unsweetened tea. An inconspicu- 
ous notebook was somewhere about his person. Each 
article was numbered. If you cared to bid for it, you 
wrote down your name and address, together with the 
number of the article and the amount you were willing 
to pay. Then you left this memorandum with the silent 
clerk and went home. If your bid turned out to be the 
highest, the coveted article was sent to your house and 
you paid for it. This seemed to me a distinct refine- 
ment over our own noisier method. 

After the auction, we went with our guide to his very 
charming Japanese house. It contained many more arti- 



THE WANDERJAHR 303 

cles than is customary in a native house, and differed 
from any house I had then ever been in, in the fact that 
every article in the house was for sale, — we were face 
to face with that peculiar institution of the East, the 
social trader. I have since been in similar houses in 
America, and I confess that they give me a strange 
sensation. Few of these Japanese goods had come from 
the auction rooms, for the native collectors are willing 
to pay such high prices for really good things that 
not even a trader selling to Americans can afford to 
compete. 

The genuinely fine things in Japan are not on sale, — 
many of them are not even in the museums. They are 
scattered about in quiet Japanese homes, or safely 
stored away in family godowns. While we were in 
Tokio, we went one cloudy afternoon to call on an old 
Japanese nobleman, Viscount Fukuoka. He received 
us in the customary European drawing-room, but even 
here a few rare prints had found their way. After the 
introductory formalities, the Viscount led the way into 
the native part of the house, and here we passed slowly 
from one simple, beautiful room to another, sitting for 
a while in each that we might enjoy its one or two art 
treasures. In one room, it was a lovely jade vase from 
China that claimed our attention ; in another, a kake- 
mono of the early school ; in a third, a wonderful gilt 
screen painted by the master-artist, Korin. In the last 
apartment of all, in the upper story, a maid removed 
the shogi that formed the outer side of the room in 
order that we might see the garden, and beyond, the 
low, gray-roofed city. At that very moment, the clouds 
parted, and the golden sunlight of late afternoon swept 
over the incomparable outline of Fuji-yama. It was a 



304 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

dramatic outburst of beauty, as if the old Viscount had 
saved this loveliest picture of them all until the last. 
He himself was a worthy part of the foreground, a 
dignified, benignant figure in dull blue silk and black, 
a follower of the high moralities of Confucius. 

The great lesson of Japan is aesthetic, — it is her 
mastery of line and color. But she has other lessons to 
teach, and one of the most notable of these is her con- 
ception of the state, and her subordination of the in- 
dividual to the state. 

While we were in Tokio, we had an opportunity to 
see the late Emperor. It was his birthday, and he was 
reviewing the troops on the military ground outside 
the city. The Imperial Pavilion stood next to that pro- 
vided for the embassies, and so we had a chance to 
watch the Emperor at not over sixty feet distance. It 
was just before the Russian War, and national feeling 
ran very high ; bat it was in the midst of the most pro- 
found silence that the Emperor arrived and entered the 
pavilion. It was in the same complete silence that he 
later made the rounds of the great plain, and sat on 
his black thoroughbred as the soldiers filed by. Silence 
and averted eyes, — I did not know how amazingly im- 
pressive they could be. To the majority of the people 
the Emperor was still a sacred person, somewhat akin 
to deity, and not to be looked upon unabashed. He was 
an extremely large man, with a fine forehead and eyes. 
The lower part of his face was a little heavy and he sat 
his horse awkwardly, but even into our stanch repub- 
lican hearts there came the feeling that we were in a 
notable presence. We saw before us the extraordinary, 
incarnate idea of the state, and we felt its immense 
continuity. 



THE WANDERJAHR 305 

Some weeks later when we were at Kioto, and jour- 
neying one day over the pass to the beautiful Lake 
Biwa, we noticed a small Japanese house most bravely 
decorated with flying banners and bright-colored 
streamers and gay flowers. Some important fete was 
evidently in progress. One of the jinricksha-men ex- 
plained to us that the owners were very poor people, 
but they had spent all they had, and incurred a bur- 
densome debt which it would take them all winter to 
pay off, in order to make this demonstration. Their 
son, it seems, had been drafted into the army, and was 
leaving them that night. They wished to express in 
this gay festival their deep sense of the honor which had 
been done them by the Emperor in thus allowing their 
son to serve him. I have often wondered whether the 
boy lived to come back to them. It seemed to me that 
they deserved such good fortune. It was easy, even 
then, to predict the outcome of the war. 

One result of this complete and utter subordination 
of the individual to the state is that, as a nation, Japan 
is simply wonderful, perhaps the most homogeneous na- 
tion of modern times, the most devoted, and, for her 
numbers and resources, the most invincible. Another 
result is that, as individuals, the Japanese are as a rule 
much less interesting than their neighbors in China and 
India. They can imitate, adapt, follow, but they seem 
lacking in originality, and once outside their own insti- 
tutions and traditions, they seem to go to pieces more 
rapidly and completely than other foreigners. When I 
lived in California, I seldom heard a word in favor of 
the Japanese, and never once, I believe, a single word 
against a Chinaman. I hear that the Japanese are giv- 
ing a somewhat better account of themselves in Hawaii, 



306 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

This may be because of their greater segregation there, 
and the resulting sense of communal responsibility. The 
Japanese " problem " seems to me to lie just here, — 
how can such a people adapt themselves to the individ- 
ualism of modern Western ideas, and maintain their 
own moral integrity ? I, for one, feel that we who helped 
to press this problem upon them ought to be very pa- 
tient, and ready to help, rather than revile. 

Religion seems to be a very real thing in Japan, and 
to have a genuine hold upon the people. This is true of 
both Buddhism and Shintoism, and apparently there is 
no present antagonism between the two faiths. In Kioto, 
we lived at the Yami Hotel, on the hillside overlooking 
the city. Next to us were the Temple of Chionin and 
its wonderful garden. Whenever we went down into 
the city, — and that was practically every day, — we 
passed through the garden and drank in the beauty of 
the temple and its setting ; and every day the bells 
of Chionin sounded in our ears and called to gentle 
worship. There are few more beautiful things in the 
world than an old Buddhist temple, especially when 
the temple is in the midst of a lovely garden, and the 
garden is on a hillside. At Nikko the temples are in 
themselves such amazing works of art that the Japan- 
ese have the well-known proverb, " See Nikko, and 
die " ; but both temples and tombs owe much of their 
splendid effectiveness to their location on a picturesque 
mountain-side, to the lovely gardens which surround 
them, and to the majestic cryptomeria which tower over 
everything. At Chionin the beauty is of a lower pitch, 
but so exquisite and so intimate that I felt I should like 
to touch it, to pass my hand over the velvet browns of 
the low, down-sloping roof, to handle appreciatively the 



THE WANDERJAHR 307 

lacquer-work of the altar, to rest my body against the 
rich foliage of the garden. I think that when the time 
comes, I should like to die in some such garden, and 
after my friend had ceased to speak and his farewell 
was safe within my soul, to feel only the pressure of his 
hand, and to hear the bells of Chionin grow fainter and 
fainter, as I passed on into the Great Peace. 

The worshipers in these Buddhist temples, and at the 
many Shinto shrines, — if I mistake not, many went 
with equal reverence from one to the other, — seemed 
gentle and sincere, and to judge from their faces, car- 
ried God's peace away with them. It is an enlarging 
experience to feel that no temple, no holy place, is alien, 
but that at each one may stop and worship and come 
away refreshed. 

I have called Kioto the Firenze of Japan, for here 
one drinks in the aroma of a grandeur that is past and 
of a beauty that endures. At one time the city is sup- 
posed to have sheltered nearly two million people, and 
almost to have filled the mountain-encircled plain. Now 
it has shrunk to perhaps one tenth its former size. The 
frail Japanese houses leave no traces when they disap- 
pear, no crumbling chimney, no hole in the ground that 
was once a cellar, nothing but the smooth green earth 
which is once more free of them. But the beautiful 
temples remain. They, too, are of wood, and all too 
frail, but pious hands take care of them, and repair 
them, and renew them. The lovely old temple gardens 
are still the abode of orderliness and of peace. We drove 
for miles in our jinrickshas through silent green fields 
from one of these oases of the spirit to another, As 
mountain and forest add their own impressiveness to the 
temples at Nikko, and hillside and garden to Chionin, 



308 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

so here the silence and the sunny green fields touch one 
deej)ly as one goes from lonely temple to lonely temple. 
Once they were part of a great throbbing city, the city 
of the Mikado ; once they were thronged by multitudes 
of wor shipers. Now city and Emperor and worshipers 
have receded like an outgoing tide, and these temples 
stand alone. They reminded me of those wonderful 
Greek temples at Pesto, now standing in the midst of 
green fields and olive orchards where once a busy Latin 
seaport thronged about them, and companies of the 
homesick children of Greece came to pour out their 
worship and their nostalgia. 

We carried a letter of introduction to a rare old 
Buddhist priest at one of the loveliest and most isolated 
of these deserted temples. We could not gain access to 
him, or make the young acolyte understand our errand ; 
so later, we wrote a letter asking the old man to dine 
with us at our hotel. We understood that he liked oc- 
casionally to make these slight excursions into the outer 
world. We kept our tryst, my brother and I, and there 
was a third cover at table, but our guest did not come, 
— he had gained Nirvana six months previously. 

When our month at Kioto ended, we turned away 
with genuine regret. We had learned to love the city, 
but not to know her. We felt that we had only pene- 
trated to the threshold. The real Kioto lies beyond, 
undiscoverable to the Western spirit, even though every 
door had been thrown wide open. Lafcadio Hearn, 
among Americans, came the nearest to understanding 
the spirit of Japan. All his books are illuminating, but 
" Japan : an Interpretation," published shortly after our 
visit, remains the spiritual guide to Japan. I have only 
been able to touch upon the profound impression which 



THE WANDERJAHR 309 

Japan made upon us. In three months one can see only 
a small fraction of her beauty, and in the deeper matters 
of the spirit can gain only occasional glimpses. And 
yet, as a personal experience in education, Japan has not 
yet spent herself, and I know that each day we are a 
little different from having been there. 

China, I regret to say, had no direct message. Our 
glimpse was too brief, and the conditions were not fa- 
vorable. It was shortly after the Boxer uprising, and 
it was neither agreeable nor wholly safe to go about at 
all freely. We saw Shanghai, lived a few days at Hong- 
kong, and had a genuinely interesting visit to Canton. 
But we did not meet the Chinese, beyond, of course, our 
several guides and a few shopkeepers. But what we 
saw whetted our appetite for more, and we shall never be 
quite contented, I suppose, until we have seen Peking 
and come to know some representative Chinamen in 
their own homes. In Canton I saw a man whose thoughts 
I should much like to have shared. He was apparently 
a man of distinction. He was dressed in beautiful dark 
silks, and rode in an inclosed chair which had much the 
air of a limousine. I caught a glimpse of his face as our 
own open chairs swung past his, and never in any 
human face have I seen more active dislike and more 
contempt. We were evidently " foreign devils " to him, 
as well as to his more ignorant countrymen. I should 
much like to have known just what he was thinking, 
and of what he accused us. Our glimpse of China was 
meager in the extreme, but it was valuable, for through 
it we annexed a new empire of interest. The present 
stirring news finds us eager listeners, and less uncom- 
prehending perhaps than we should otherwise have 
been. 



S10 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

Hongkong is, of course, English, and one may suit- 
ably pause here to make a couple of practical remarks. 
The first and more important one is that we bought 
our tickets completely around the world, — from Bos- 
ton to Boston, — and that we should hardly do it again. 
It would be considerably wiser to buy a ticket to Hong- 
kong, with stop-over privileges en route, then to Lon- 
don, and finally home. One grows wiser as the journey 
advances, and by this recommended plan one can have 
somewhat more freedom as to routes. The expense would 
be very little greater. The second remark is merely 
curious. At Hongkong it is impossible, or was eight 
years ago, to stop at a hotel for a single day. You may 
have only dinner, a bed, and breakfast, but your bill 
will be for two clays. The inverted logic is that you 
arrived yesterday and leave to-day, therefore you have 
enjoyed their hospitality for two days. By arriving at 
12.01 A.M. and leaving at 11.59 p.m. one might, I sup- 
pose, be a one-day guest, but the hours do not appeal 
to the majority of travelers. I hope that the custom has 
changed, for, in addition to the injustice, it produces an 
irritation which is neither flattering to the city nor 
wholesome for the guest. 

To have read Kipling, and especially " Kim " and the 
" Plain Tales from the Hills," will make a man at home 
in India from the very start. It will even let itself be 
felt at Hongkong in making one decide to take a P. & O. 
steamer for Colombo. Ours chanced to be a small one. 
There were only twelve passengers, and one of them, 
poor lady, died en route, and was buried early one morn- 
ing in the shimmering, tepid waters of the Bay of Ben- 
gal. As we had no storms and loitered longer at Sing- 
apore and Penang than larger steamers would have done, 



THE WANDERJAHR 311 

we found the choice fortunate. It gave us, among other 
things, a chance to know the officers, and they were 
worth study. They were outwardly such decent fellows, 
■ — they dressed for dinner every evening and read the 
Anglican service on deck of a Sunday morning, — but 
all the while they were so persistently and unnecessar- 
ily rude. That the captain told me I ought to be boiled 
in oil for having my brother study French at sea, I re- 
garded, of course, as a mere British pleasantry and took 
no offense. But in all their talk there lurked a disagree- 
able sneer, not only against America and Americans, 
but against all the rest of the world not of their own 
nationality. It seemed too bad to have traveled so ex- 
tensively and to have remained so hopelessly insular. 
With these object-lessons before us, we were moved to 
cultivate the cosmopolitan spirit with assiduity and 
effectiveness. To move forward freely, each in his own 
path. 

One of the most interesting books for a traveler in 
the Far East is the well-known work by Meredith 
Townsend, " Europe and Asia." I have read it twice, 
and each time have been struck with the shrewdness of 
his observations and the range of his facts. After an 
intimate contact with the East covering many years, he 
reached the conclusion that Asia will never be Euro- 
peanized, a conclusion which naturally seemed to us 
very wise, since it agreed with our own. But he draws 
a further conclusion which we could not share ; he 
regards this essential and irremediable divergence as 
unfortunate. To me it is a distinct cause for gratitude. 
It is not, for a moment, that Asia is better than Eu- 
rope, but rather that excellence is not all of one pat- 
tern. It is no more desirable that all nations should be 



312 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

alike than it is that all persons should be alike. Think 
how tiresome it would be if all the world seemed to 
come from Hoboken, — or even from Boston ! One of 
the grave objections to our present very inadequate 
scheme of elementary education is that it crushes indi- 
viduality, and gives us a lot of dull and hopelessly com- 
monplace persons. Europe is still a distinctly more 
interesting place than America. Our own wiseacres are 
forever saying that one ought to see one's own country 
first, and they say it with particular emphasis if they 
have never been abroad and know very little of Amer- 
ica into the bargain. But the truth is that we are not 
much to see, just because we are so distressingly uni- 
form. When you have seen one town in New England, 
one in the Middle States, one in the South, one in the 
Middle West, one in the arid districts, one in southern 
California, and one on the North Pacific Coast, you have 
practically seen all. In the matter of houses we have 
five easily recognizable types, — Colonial, Bungalow, 
Italian, Queen Anne, and Carpenter and Builder, — 
with the latter much predominating. There is a particu- 
lar model of the modern Colonial which can be found at 
Battle Creek, San Antonio, Jacksonville, and hundreds 
of other places. Arrive after dark and enter one of 
these houses, and you could not guess the section, to 
say nothing of the state. This uniformity is due to our 
newness and our quick prosperity, — we have done so 
much in such a short while, — but it is not admirable. 
It is admittedly tiresome, and our people are beginning 
to find it so. They are beginning to care to meet local 
conditions, to evolve a suitable architecture, and to have 
regard for home-made, hand-made things. This is what 
Europe was obliged to do. She grew up before the 



THE WANDEKJAHR 313 

time of railroads. Towns separated by thirty miles 
were a full day's journey apart, and the roads did not 
encourage the transportation of heavy goods. And so 
local art and architecture and craftsmanship were the 
inevitable and beautiful result. When you have seen 
one town in Europe, you have not seen another. In less 
than an hour's journey, you are in the presence of a 
new individuality. Under these circumstances, it is not 
unpatriotic, but merely truthful to admit that it is more 
profitable to see the older countries first ; to go where 
men have been longer at work ; and where for the ex- 
penditure of the same time and money, one can get the 
larger return in impressions and sound instruction. I 
am optimistic enough to believe that this raw transition 
period in America is going to blossom into something 
very fine, and that we are going to regain-and heighten 
the interest and individuality of our forefathers without 
resuming their prejudices and mistakes. But this is not 
inevitable. We do not get anything without working 
for it. We had to work to make the world what it is, 

we have still got to work to make it better. A boy 

ought to come home from the world-journey that truer 
type of man, a cosmopolite, at home everywhere, and 
to whom no man is a " foreigner." As Baha'u'llah says, 
" Let not a man so glory in this, that he loves his coun- 
try ; but let him rather glory in this, that he loves his 
kind ! " Such a boy will be the better American, and 
will render the more effective, because the more intelli- 
gent, service. 

In India, one learns this great lesson of intellectual 
and spiritual toleration. Even Islam seems in India to 
have lost much of its characteristic fanaticism. But the 
dominant force is not Islam, but Hinduism, and the 



314 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

keynote of Hinduism is its universality, its immense 
toleration. It is a religion without a creed, a cult whose 
initial command is that the disciple must even oppose 
his own master until persuaded of the unescapable 
truth of his teaching. It may be different in the remote 
villages, but the Hindus whom we met felt no antago- 
nism to Christianity. On the contrary, they welcomed 
it as Europe's mode of seeking God. The Hindu does not 
see a very attractive side of Christianity. He sees it as 
the cult of a conquering people who treat him as a rule 
with scant consideration and courtesy. The Anglican 
contempt for the Indian, as a being both inferior and 
different, extends as well to his religion and philoso- 
phy. One who visits India in the true spirit of the stu- 
dent must be careful to keep his poise. He cannot know 
India any mo* e than he can know Japan, — I seriously 
doubt whether a Westerner ever penetrates into the 
mysteries of the Asiatic soul ; but he will gain more, 
I think, if he associates sparingly with the small army 
of English office-holders, the governing class which rules 
India every winter, and goes back to England every 
summer ; and tries instead to know the educated na- 
tives. 

It was our good fortune to have introductions to a 
remarkable group of men and women in Calcutta, who 
showed us somewhat of the inner heart of India, and 
who, though Hindus, sent us with equal enthusiasm to 
Budh-Gaya, the most sacred spot on earth in the view 
of the Buddhist world, and to Benares, their own Holy 
City. Our guide was a devout Hindu, who was, I think, 
the most essentially religious man I have ever known. 
Religion was to him a matter of his whole being, a con- 
cern of the whole twenty-four hours. He has now passed 



THE WANDERJAHR 315 

into the great experience of the Hereafter. Perhaps 
what touched me most about him was his frank delight 
in Budh-Gaya, and his immense reverence for it. It 
will be remembered that Buddha here gained Enlight- 
enment, his great lesson of compassion for all created 
life. There is a very ancient temple, and the famous 
railing of Asoka, and within the railing a vigorous tree 
which is supposed to be a descendant of the very Bo- 
tree under which Lord Buddha sat. In point of numbers, 
Buddhism is still the leading religion of the world, and 
this spot, therefore, to a majority of all worshipers, is 
the most Holy Place on earth. One cannot stand un- 
worshipful at such a spot, or go away unmoved and 
unchastened. This alone would make it consecrated. It 
is additionally sacred when one recalls the elevated teach- 
ings of Buddha, and recognizes in them the source of 
an important element in our own Christian cult. 

We are prone to forget the size of India, for we com- 
monly see it represented by maps of so much smaller 
scale that its real dimensions do not strike the imaadna- 
tion. I want sometime to see a beautiful atlas published 
in which all the countries of the world shall be repre- 
sented on the same scale, the same detail given for each, 
and the same comparative facts. We think of India as 
populous, but we hardly remember that she has about 
four times the population of our own United States. 
We think, of plague and famine as disasters, and forget 
that they are always on, and that it is only when they 
become acute that we hear of them. We picture India 
as rich, spectacularly rich, and do not realize that every 
night the sun goes down upon millions of hungry hu- 
man beings. It is not too much to say that every mo- 
ment some one in India is dying of hunger. In our own 



316 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

short stay of two months we covered something like 
four thousand miles, entering at Tuticorin, going up 
the east coast to Calcutta and Darjeeling, crossing the 
empire through the line of cities, — Benares, Agra, 
Delhi, Lucknow, Jaipur, Ajmir, — and going out from 
Bombay. We saw but a fraction of India, but we tried, 
as far as we could, to catch the spirit of her national 
life, her worship and her art. I can imagine nothing 
more instructive than to go from Japan to India. In 
Japan we saw a country where the nation is everything, 
and the individual nothing; a country therefore in- 
tensely interesting as a whole, but bewildering in the 
matter of persons. In India it is the reverse. In India 
there is no genius for nationality, for association, for 
cooperation. Her history is one of turmoil. She has 
always been the victim of internal dissensions or of for- 
eign invasion. To-day less than half a million English- 
men govern and hold in subjection four hundred mil- 
lion natives, — one Anglo-Saxon to eight hundred In- 
dians. And it will be so for many generations to come. 
India may gain a limited home rule under England, or 
may, in the shifting chances of European politics, even 
change her masters, but that will be all. She is not a 
whole in the sense that Japan is a whole, or even in the 
sense that we are. She is an immense aggregation of 
individuals, and this is the secret of her weakness as a 
nation, and her interestingness as a people. When you 
think of India you may think of her vast size, of her 
magnificent mountains, of her huge temples, of her 
troubled history, of her present masters, of their diffi- 
cult problems; but this is not your inmost thought. The 
real India is a spiritual company, individual seekers 
after God, who have such small turn for administration 



THE WANDERJAHR 317 

and economics because they are absorbed in the greater 
passion. There is something very fine in all this. But 
to the English, with their genius for governing and for 
all practical affairs, it is apt to be simply irritating and 
the evidence of a national incompetence. Here there is 
a capital chance for education in judgment. A people 
may properly be criticized for not going in for a thing 
known to be admirable, and may be justly condemned, 
but they must never be accounted incompetent because 
they fail to attain something which they never set out 
to attain. India never attempted preeminence in prac- 
tical things. Her quest has always been for the things 
of the spirit. From the Anglo-Saxon point of view, both 
American and English, India allows far too much phys- 
ical suffering, allows too many to die of plague and 
starvation, and it is inevitable that Indian thought 
should materially suffer from this too-great divorce be- 
tween spirit and body. In spite of its subtlety and its 
many victories, it strikes one as lacking in robustness, 
as putting too much emphasis upon another world, and 
too little upon this. 

My own circle of Indian friends were of the modern 
school, many of them nationalists who cherished the 
illusion of a self-governing India. They felt one and all 
that India's present needs are practical, and that she 
especially needs a fuller knowledge of natural science 
and its application to the affairs of daily life. They 
were particularly keen for industrial education. I am 
tempted to quote one incident which gave me much pleas- 
ure personally, but the credit of which belongs wholly 
to circumstances. The Sister Nivedita asked of me, as 
she did of all earnest visitors, some service for her 
beloved India. She would have preferred to have me 



318 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

remain as tutor to one of the native princes, and con- 
sequent educational director of a native state. As this 
was quite impossible, she decided that in the short time 
at our disposal my largest service would be to submit 
to a searching interview on the subject of manual train- 
ing and modern technical education. We spent a busy 
afternoon together. Those who have read Nivedita's 
brilliant books about Indian life can readily imagine 
the skill with which she put this voluminous material 
into shape. It was published in " The Statesman," and 
afterwards reprinted in pamphlet form, and sent, I be- 
lieve, to all the native princes. As a result, a number 
of native students were sent to Europe and America. 
Two or three years later, one of these men fell into my 
own hands in Boston, and through the generosity of Mrs. 
Shaw was able to carry Mr. Larsson off to India to 
conduct normal classes in sloyd for the native teachers. 
Still a year or two later, a letter from India told me 
that thirteen hundred children were under instruction 
in the one state. By this time I suppose that several 
thousand Indian children are having manual training 
as a direct result of Sister Nivedita's timely act. My 
own share in this big harvest was infinitesimal. I found 
a loaded gun already aimed, and was permitted, by kind 
chance, to pull the trigger. 

It is difficult even for a sympathetic Anglo-Saxon 
always to be patient with this preoccupation of the In- 
dian mind. In Calcutta, for example, it is hot even in 
midwinter, and you must drive everywhere. You get 
into a cab, give your directions to the driver, and start 
off hopefully. After a time the driver turns around and 
asks you where you want to go. Then he drives some- 
where in the desired neighborhood and by dint of ask- 



THE WANDERJAHR 319 

ing two or even three persons, finally lands you at your 
destination, invariably late for your engagement. In 
Paris, a driver who failed to take you by the most 
direct route to any city address would run the risk of 
losing his license. When I complained of the Calcutta 
cab-drivers, Nivedita told me that they had more 
important things to think about than my poor little 
errands ; that they were engaged in spiritual medita- 
tion. Now between cab-driving and spiritual meditation 
there is no question as to which is the higher employ- 
ment, but one must still do what one pretends to do. 

It may be that this neglect of the body and this pre- 
occupation with the things of the spirit have led India 
to do so little in art. Her temples are among the most 
ancient and most interesting in the world ; they speak 
of many things, and possess many qualities of distinc- 
tion ; but they are not beautiful. Their builders seem 
to have realized the effectiveness of large masses, boldly 
employed, but they failed apparently to have any con- 
ception of the pure beauty of line and form and color. 
We saw many impressive things in India, but aside 
from her immense natural beauty, — such incomparable 
scenes, for example, as the Himalayas from Darjeeling, 
— we saw nothing beautiful of purely Indian, that is 
to say, Hindu, origin. At the technical school in 
Madura, the kind director showed us some objects of 
rare ugliness which he was having his Indian boys in- 
nocently make, explaining with pride that the work was 
Gothic design with Dravidian detail. The results were 
singularly bad. We felt a genuine sympathy with the 
spiritual life of India, a genuine interest in her won- 
derful historic monuments, and for her people, the affec- 
tion of a genuine friendship. It seemed strange to me 



320 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

then, and it seems more strange to me now as I think 
about it, that these highly developed, spiritually minded 
Aryan people should have so little sense of the beauti- 
ful. Their personal dress was in some cases exquisite, 
but the national defect in aesthetic apprehension showed 
itself in the mounting of gems and in those minor 
forms of craftsmanship and decoration which reveal a 
true perception of beauty. After Japan, the Indian 
wares were clumsy, almost repulsive. 

I am not forgetting Agra, and that wonderful Taj 
Mahal which is among the most beautiful buildings in 
the world. But it is not Indian. It is the work of a 
Moslem invader, the Shah Jehan, and owes much of its 
rare beauty, its marble, lace-like screen, its delicate ara- 
besques of inlaid jewels, to a French artist who was 
pressed into service. It is also significant, I think, that 
the Taj Mahal is essentially individualistic. It was built 
by one man to express his love for one woman. It is no 
less beautiful because it is both exotic and personal. 
On the latter ground, its beauty is even more touching. 
But it is not Indian. It is also worth mentioning that 
in a country whose princes are notoriously rich in gems 
and other personal and individual impedimenta, it re- 
mained for the stranger from overseas, the English- 
man, to rescue the Taj Mahal from decay and restore 
it to its original loveliness. We reached Agra in the 
morning, and with difficult self-control, kept away from 
the Taj until the proper hour, towards sunset. Then 
we saw it at its best, and later, by moonlight. In the 
early morning the impression was still different. 

In this rapid survey of the journey across India, it 
is only possible, perhaps only desirable, to record gen- 
eral impressions, but I must not omit two small incidents 



THE WANDERJAHR 321 

at our port of exit, Bombay. It is the city of the Par- 
sees, and we had the advantage, through an advance 
letter, of winning friendship and hospitality among them. 
They number, in the entire empire, only about half a 
million, so that numerically speaking they are an insig- 
nificant sect among the greater sects of India. But they 
are so intelligent, so rationalistic, so competent that they 
seemed to exert an influence quite out of proportion 
to their numbers. We visited their remarkable Pesta- 
lozzi school, where object-teaching was carried to the 
verge of dizziness ; we walked with them by the sea, 
at the hour of sunset prayer ; we looked upon the out- 
side of their curious burial ghat, where the naked dead 
are exposed to vultures, and listened to their explana- 
tion of its democratic purpose, that in death all shall 
stand upon the same footing ; we were twice the guests 
of a charming Parsee gentleman and his beautifully 
dressed daughters. The whole was a brief experience, 
— a matter of only a few days, — but it added a new 
knowledge and therefore a new interest. 

The second incident was an affair of a few moments, 
but the memory remains well rooted, for we had an 
opportunity to observe with our own eyes that splendid 
Anglo-Saxon sense of justice which has made England 
respected, the world over, even when her lack of sym- 
pathy and consideration has not allowed her to be loved. 
We were invited to attend a session of the High Court, 
and chanced upon the final scene in a famous suit, with 
the details of which we were already familiar. An Indian 
editor, a most outspoken nationalist and bitter opponent 
of British rule, had been practically persecuted for two 
years by a group of his own countrymen. A native 
court had, for reasons best known to itself, sustained the 



322 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

grave and absurd charges brought against him, and had 
rendered judgment involving imprisonment. The case 
was appealed from Poonah to the High Court at Bom- 
bay. It remained for an English judge, in a wonderful 
summing-up of the case, to expose the absurdity of the 
proceedings in the lower native court, to reverse its de- 
cision, and to set a man free who was probably as ob- 
noxious to the Government as any man then living in 
India. For manners, I might turn to some other nation- 
ality, but for justice, I should prefer to take my chances 
with an Englishman. 

It was early in March when we boarded the Persia 
and turned once more to the West. As that is the sea- 
son when Anglo-Indian officials, fortunate enough to 
have leave of absence, start for home, — England always 
remained home, — we found ourselves in the midst of 
the governing classes. It goes without saying that as 
individuals many of them were agreeable, delightful per- 
sons, and devoted in a large way to their self-imposed 
task. But the price, the price which England pays for 
trying to govern so much of the rest of the world, seemed 
to my anti-imperialistic mind, excessive and unwarran- 
ted. It was a small world, full of petty distinctions and 
insular prejudices, the sort of parochialism which one 
would have to fight very shy of, if one were to deserve 
to be called educated. The majority of these "Builders 
of Empire " appeared to be ill in body or soul, or both. 
By comparison, they made my Hindu saint, possessed 
of little beyond his spiritual appreciation, and the im- 
mense leisure which belongs to all who refrain from in- 
terfering with other people, seem singularly and surpris- 
ingly wealthy. 

In March it is pleasant sailing across the Indian 



THE WANDERJAHR 323 

Ocean and up the Red Sea. After the tepid atmosphere 
of Bombay it was a welcome tonic to breathe the invig- 
orating air of the open sea. But at Suez we met with a 
grave disappointment, which I only mention because it 
is a type of thing which the world-journeyer must learn 
to meet and accept with such grace as he can command. 
At Suez we learned that an Indian postal clerk on the 
Persia had been removed at Aden on account of an ill- 
ness which later proved to be the plague, and that as 
far as Egypt was concerned, we were all quarantined. 
This meant that we must either spend from eight days 
to two weeks in detention a,t Moses' Wells, or must go 
directly on to Europe. As my brother and I had suf- 
fered one quarantine at Kandy, we had not the heart 
to meet another, and so transferred ourselves to the 
speedy but very agitated and uncomfortable little 
steamer which rushes the Indian mail over to Brindisi, 
and the London express. Our regret was the keener 
because, in giving up Egypt, we also gave up Palestine 
and Greece. We tried to comfort ourselves, and on the 
whole successfully, with the thought that after such tre- 
mendous experiences as Japan, China, and India, it 
might be well to leave Egypt, Palestine, and Greece until 
another time. To visit six such countries in one winter 
and spring might easily confuse the stoutest heart. 

The trip through Italy, up to Buda-Pesth, and across 
middle Europe, is quite as wonderful in its way as the 
less usual visit to the Far East, provided, of course, 
that one goes as a student and not as a mere sight-seer ; 
but it is too well known to require even casual mention. 

I am placing so much stress upon the world-journey 
as the best possible education for a lad between seven- 
teen and eighteen, because its value has been so largely 



324 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

overlooked. I always add that he must go in suitable 
company and as a serious student, not as a globe-trot- 
ter bent only upon a good time. There are many per- 
sons in our very rich country who could easily afford 
to give their sons such a trip. And there are many par- 
ents who could profitably undertake such a journey 
with their boy, and shake off some of their own pro- 
vincialism and small-mindedness while they are help- 
ing him to accomplish the same gracious task. It is 
vastly better for a lad of parts to spend three years at 
the high school in hard work, and then one year in in- 
telligent travel, than to devote four years to the school 
and adolescent distractions, and then go directly to col- 
lege. This presupposes, of course, that he has been prop- 
erly brought up. If the lad is a simpleton or a hope- 
less snob, it makes small difference where he is or what 
he does. 

I realize, of course, that the rank and file of our 
American people cannot afford even two thousand dol- 
lars to send a boy around the world, and particularly 
if there are several children to be educated. I realize 
that many of them cannot even send the boy to college ; 
that they have no choice, — that they must send him at 
once to work. When our industrial life is organized 
according to some adequate social plan and purpose, 
when we have approached what Mr. Wells happily 
calls "the Great State," some such educational pro- 
gramme will be increasingly possible for all promising 
boys. But meanwhile the majority of our high-school 
graduates are not in a position to travel. At seventeen 
they generally possess a limited wardrobe, a few Christ- 
mas books, a bicycle, a cheap rifle, a mandolin, a tool 



THE WANDERJAHR 325 

or two, considerable half knowledge, and a large stock 
of small and false ideas of life. In a word, a typical 
middle-class lad of seventeen is excessively crude and 
provincial. The question at issue is whether this liber- 
ating principle of the Wanderjalir can be applied to 
a boy of very limited means, one whose possessions do 
not exceed those I have just named. I am disposed to 
think that it can, and with gratifying success. The first 
condition is that the boy shall have a firm hold upon 
the idea. It is one of the glorious things about America 
that nowhere else, perhaps, can the possessor of an idea 
more freely and more easily put it to the test of action. 
And the tragedy is that so few of our lads have any big 
ideas of life to try out ! 

Given the idea, our lad must, with the help of an 
older and wiser friend, look over the field of possibili- 
ties and decide which offers the most fruitful prospect. 
If the lad has been brought up in town, a very obvious 
move would be to seek a year in the country. In many 
cases, an uncle or a cousin or a grandfather, who still 
sticks to the farm, would be glad to receive such a guest ; 
and the lad could, by wholesome outdoor work, pay for 
his board, and possibly in harvest time do a little bet- 
ter. If there is no such convenient relative, it is nearly 
always possible by judicious inquiry to find a reputable 
family who would serve instead. If the boy has been 
brought up in the country, a glimpse of city life in win- 
ter, under wholesome conditions, would be highly in- 
structive. For the rest of the year, he might profitably 
seek another section of the country. It is an excellent 
thing for a Southern boy to go North, for a Northern 
boy to go West, for a Western boy to go to an older 
community. In many cases, our American families still 



326 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

have relatives in Europe who would be genuinely glad 
to welcome a boy of the New World for several months 
or a year, and have him share their daily life of work 
and play. In some cases, cousins could change places for 
a time, and not only benefit by the change, but also 
strengthen those family bonds which distance is so sure 
to weaken. 

If the lad is of a more adventurous turn of mind, it 
is often possible to find him a place on a surveying 
party, or a berth with a decent captain starting on a 
long voyage, or a post on some upland ranch where he 
can for a time play cowboy in earnest. All these plans 
have their dangers, both physical and moral, — but life 
itself is dangerous. The plan presupposes two things : 
first, that the lad, at seventeen, has developed enough 
intelligence and physique and moral fiber to look after 
himself under all ordinary conditions ; and secondly, 
that, wherever he goes in quest of wholesome adventure, 
he will be under the eye of some trustworthy counselor 
who will help him get the good out of the adventure 
and avoid any neighboring harm. There are plenty of 
scoundrels in the world, but happily there are many 
more decent persons. The majority may be common- 
place, and incapable themselves of originating any novel 
plan of life, but a surprising number will play up to a 
big idea, if they once apprehend it. At the present 
moment there must be in the United States a million 
or two boys between seventeen and eighteen years of 
age. If this scheme of the Wanderjahr could be taken 
hold of by these boys and their parents and teachers as a 
thing really to be desired, I venture 1 to think that there 
would be as many pairs of helping hands as there were 
boys to be heartened and set on their way. There are 



THE WANDEEJAHR 327 

city homes that would open to country boys ; country 
homes that would open to city boys ; Northern houses 
that would open to Southern boys ; Western ranches 
that would welcome Eastern boys. No house is really 
worth while without a good live boy in it. There need 
be no favor about it. The boy would give by his cheery 
presence quite as much as he received, — it would be 
an equal exchange in which at the least neither would be 
cheated, and at its best, both would be enriched. There are 
thousands of middle-aged men and women in America to 
whom such a charming young guest would be a veritable 
Godsend, — childless couples, or persons who have lost 
their own son by death or marriage and who are feeling 
all the loneliness of the deserted nest. It is very easy 
to find out their standing and trustworthiness. It would, 
of course, have to be a part of the scheme that the host 
should not spoil his guest by indulgence and soft living, 
and that he should create no future claim upon him. 
The boy ought to pay as he goes, by rendering some 
fitting daily service, and at the end, the account should 
stand squared and closed. It might be practical to com- 
bine the scheme of the Wanderjahr with the Boy Scout 
movement, and so open up a large territory of new ex- 
perience to the boy world, and a pleasant opportunity 
of service and companionship to an adult world unwil- 
lingly finding itself getting out of the current of active 
life. 

I have just been spending a week in the beautiful 
old city of Savannah. Oglethorpe, you may remember, 
laid it off after the plan of a Spanish camp. Its ample 
drill-ground still gives it the aspect of a military city, 
and this effect is heightened by the fact that it is now 
a vigorous recruiting station for both army and navy. 



328 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

The city is well placarded with colored lithographs, some 
of them as large as circus posters and for the most part 
exceedingly well done. One poster in particular depicts 
army life so attractively, and in the midst of such en- 
chanting natural scenery, that though I am a member 
of the Peace Society and now beyond the prescribed age 
limits, I feel, as I look at the poster, all the thrill of a 
possible recruit. Just why Uncle Sam should be en- 
camped on the hillside above that very beautiful but 
dangerous resort, Monte Carlo, it is not quite easy to 
see. But the thing that strikes me in all these alluring 
posters is the nature of the appeal. There is no sugges- 
tion of civic duty, no waving of the flag, no mention of 
patriotism, no hint of the country's possible need. On 
the contrary, the appeal is absolutely and frankly to 
selfish motives. It is to a young man's desire to see the 
world, to his love of pomp and novelty, to his high 
sense of adventure. Along with the promise of a wonder- 
fully good time, there is the hint that he will be getting 
an education free of cost, and his clothes and pocket- 
money to boot. It is all in marked contrast to the send- 
ing forth of the Japanese boy from that tiny cottage 
on the road to Lake Biwa. Since modern warfare is 
either political or commercial, and not complicated by 
ideal aims, there is of course small field for the emotion 
of patriotism, and I like the honesty which omits cant 
and the stock phrases. But somehow it carries one back 
to the days of Rome and the time of paid mercenaries. 
And yet what these highly colored posters do appeal 
to is perfectly legitimate. But it seems to me that these 
ends could be vastly better met by sending a boy out 
into the world to study the arts of peace, to have him 
learn during his Wanderjahr how men can earn a liv- 



THE WANDERJAHR 329 

ing most honestly, and can best further both material 
welfare and international amity. It would be a vital 
part of the scheme I am here proposing that the experi- 
ence should be so framed as to help a boy decide on 
his own proper career. It ought to be a big year; it 
ought to drive home to all boys, rich and poor, clever 
and dull, strong and delicate, the thought that to play 
a man's part in the world, one must make a genuine 
contribution to its welfare. This may be in food or 
clothing or shelter, or art or literature, or public work, 
or intellectual or spiritual service, anything, indeed, of 
assured social worth. And it ought with equal insist- 
ence to impress upon him that he may not be an ex- 
ploiter of other men's labor, a speculator, a social thief. 
The most valuable lessons of the Wanderjahr are 
not specific, but general. Few of us ever quite throw 
off our provincialism. Few of us stop thinking in pro- 
vincial terms, and learn to think in terms of a larger 
morality, in big, cosmopolitan, even cosmic terms. Few 
of us are really tolerant and give over the petty habit of 
approving or disapproving the rest of creation. Few 
of us really concede to other men and women the right 
to live up to their own standards and to disregard ours. 
Yet all these things are a necessary part of education. 
A boy learns them from events, from his own experi- 
ences, above all, from persons. The best of these 
schoolmasters are unconscious, and would be quite 
amazed to know that they had served in this novel capa- 
city. Some years ago I found myself on geological 
business in a very rough mining camp in a far corner 
of New Mexico. No lines were drawn there between 
good and bad. Both walked the streets together and 
nobody called names. It was a distinct shock to a man 



330 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

to whom life had hitherto presented itself duly labeled 
and in pretty well-defined compartments. But even 
then, it began to penetrate my provincial intelligence 
that perhaps in a measure they were all good, and that 
it was not for me to play God's auctioneer, and go 
about appraising them. I was helped to this incipient 
charity by a lad whom I met there, and whom I had 
once to dine with me. He was only seventeen or eigh- 
teen, and a genuine cowboy. He had covered the range 
from Montana to the Mexican border. He had lived in 
the open, not for a few months, but for his entire life, 
and he had about him that curious mixture of leisureli- 
ness and rapid movement which characterizes wild crea- 
tures. He was rather handsome, an even brown skin, 
hair bleached yellow by the sun, and light-blue eyes as 
innocent as a child's. His idea of social pleasure was a 
dance-hall, and according to his own artless narrative 
he had touched elbows with all the world. It never 
seemed to occur to him to ask whether men and women 
were good or bad. He drew the line at no one, be- 
cause he had never been so taught. On the range, 
every one was comrade. And yet, through all this haz- 
ardous experience, he had preserved such an essential 
wholesomeness that I still think of him as one of the 
most delightful human beings whom I have ever knowi^. 
He suggested a new ideal, — the ideal of a man who calls 
no one to account, except himself, — and so helped me 
in a measure to overcome my own parochialism. 

The Wanderjahr teaches a boy many facts well 
worth the knowing, but its immense, unique service is 
to the spirit. 



XIII 

AFTERWARDS 

The objection commonly urged against the world- 
journey is that it is unsettling, that it unfits a boy for 
the humdrum routine of everyday life, even of college 
life, and makes him restless and exacting. For my own 
part I should regard much of this accusation as belong- 
ing to the merits of the experience. Thinkers are very 
rare, young or old, and if this world-journey leads a 
boy to look life in the face, to ask questions and to de- 
cline merely conventional answers, so much the better, 
so much the larger hope of the millennium and of the 
Great State. If a boy of parts, on returning to his 
home world, finds himself unfitted for routine, restless 
in the presence of dullness, asking a great deal of life, 
I should say that he is at least on the way to being 
educated. It is precisely this attitude of mind, this 
discontent with second- and third-rate things, which leads 
on to first-rate achievement. It is at least a prelude to 
education, to make a boy impatient of all that is 
ugly, and dull, and stupid, and commonplace, and 
petty, and to inspire him with the pluck to work for 
their opposites. Merely to be discontented is not 
to be educated. But to be smilingly discontented, and 
effectively at work for betterment, is the genuine hall- 
mark. 

The problem, at eighteen, reduces in the main to col- 
lege or work. The choice is generally made in a very 



332 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

mechanical sort of way. Boys of a certain social class, 
and possessed of fathers or mothers of the requisite 
means, commonly go to college ; boys of another class, 
or without parental resources, commonly go to work. 
This evidently is not a very rational way to settle so 
important an educational problem. It ought to be 
settled on temperamental, personal grounds, after due 
consultation with the boy himself. A college man, and 
especially if he has studied in both America and Eu- 
rope, is naturally keen to have all boys enjoy the same 
privilege. Personally I should be appalled at the thought 
of my own life with its three university experiences left 
out. But nevertheless, I should be far from urging that 
this is the path for every American boy. The greatest 
university has little to offer any student unless it genu- 
inely engage his spirit. If our lad at eighteen is educated, 
he has learned to think, and that miracle accomplished, 
all else follows. He will go on educating himself to 
the end of the chapter, in college or out of it. A boy 
ought not to go to college simply because it is the usual 
thing to do, or because boys of his class go, or because 
a well-to-do father would give him college in precisely 
the same indulgent spirit that he would give him a 
motor-car or a trip to Europe. Nor ought any boy of 
parts to refrain from going to college simply because 
his father is unable or unwilling to pay the bill. It is 
now practically possible for any ambitious American 
boy to go to college. There are large scholarship funds 
available, and there are many honorable methods of 
earning one's own way. The American boy who wishes 
to go to college, and fails to go, has only his own weak 
will to thank for it. Some of the best and most inter- 
esting men I know, worked their way through college 



AFTERWARDS 333 

and are the stronger for it. The man who does not go, 
and then holds it up against society as a grievance, 
merely doubles his misfortune. 

The college plan ought, I think, to be judged in the 
largest possible spirit, wholly as a question of method. 
Is it, or is it not, the most efficient method of continuing 
the work of education beyond eighteen ? Our straight, 
up-standing lad must decide for himself. He may well 
consult the best counsel at his command, but the final 
vote must be his. For perhaps a majority of boys, col- 
lege will be the best place ; for a considerable minority, 
it will not. As this minority group contains some of the 
most interesting and promising lads in the rising gen- 
eration, lads who often fail to come into their own 
through misunderstanding and undue opposition, it may 
be well to consider their case first. 

I am increasingly convinced that artistic boys ought 
not to go to our ordinary literary and scientific col- 
leges. It is not that the subjects taught there would fail 
to be of value in an artistic career. The reason is a 
simple organic one, — the boys are meanwhile growing 
old. At eighteen, the plasticity of boyhood is already 
on the wane. The boy who goes in for music, or paint- 
ing, or sculpture, must guard these youthful years most 
jealously. It is the art of actual performance which he 
must cultivate. It is his wonderful execution which is 
later to delight his day and generation, rather than his 
theoretical knowledge. The older hand cannot gain this 
cunning, nor the older throat. The boy who wishes to 
be a musician must go at once to a conservatory or to 
a master, and must every day spend long hours with his 
chosen instrument, whether it be voice, or violin, or 
piano, or 'cello, or harp. He must put all his energy into 



334 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

the work, his very soul, and he can have no time for 
the ordinary college and its tasks. 

I have in mind now a young musician whose knowl- 
edge and temperament qualify him for a master role, 
but unfortunately his father insisted that the boy should 
first go to college. The lad is now a bachelor of arts, 
if that is any comfort, but he missed his own flood-tide 
of opportunity and will never be a master of the first 
rank. In the middle twenties, he has the developed 
brains of a musician but not the obedient, instinctive 
hands ; and his chosen instrument, the piano, must on 
the great occasions of music be played upon by some one 
else. 

It is the same with painting. I have in mind a lad 
of sixteen who, contrary to the advice of his best friends 
(myself included) , brought his literary education to an 
abrupt close at the end of his second year in a high 
school, and devoted himself wholly to painting. He 
worked several years in America, studied a year abroad, 
— chiefly in copying Franz Hals and Velasquez, — and 
is now one of the most promising among our younger 
portrait painters. I recently visited his studio and 
found portraits there comparable to those of Sargent 
and the older masters. A friend of mine in Washing- 
ton, a distinguished sculptor, tells me that the same 
holds good in sculpture. A boy must early learn to think 
with his finger-tips, — to see and feel, indeed, as well as 
think. He himself began very early, — he never went to 
college. 

That most of our musicians and artists would be the 
better off for a larger intellectual and spiritual culture, 
would be greater musicians and greater artists, is pal- 
pably and undeniably true. If they had been properly 



AFTERWARDS 335 

educated up to eighteen, they would have gained the 
elements of this culture and the impulse to go on, as 
well as the requisite preliminary training of the sense 
organs. Even though they now devoted themselves al- 
most exclusively to the chosen art-work, they would of 
necessity have gone on growing in other lines as well. 

I am not forgetting that artistry includes the crafts- 
man in words, the man of letters. It is a debatable ques- 
tion whether he ought to go to college. Formerly it was 
believed, of course, that the college existed peculiarly 
for him. The first step for any literary aspirant was to 
try to go to college. But somehow the laurels have 
mainly been won by men outside. There is such a thing 
as the academic blight, a cursed self -consciousness which 
keeps a man from doing the great thing in literature 
because he knows so well how it ought to be done ! 
Many of our dramatists, poets, novelists, essayists, biog- 
raphers have been college men, and have rendered a 
very good account of themselves, but the greatest have 
come from the open. At the present moment our col- 
leges of the first rank seem to have awakened to this 
anomaly. In schools of dramatic composition, schools of 
journalism, and by other practical measures, they are 
encouraging their students to do as well as to know how 
it ought to be done, and are instructing them in the 
rudiments of true literary craftsmanship. I should my- 
self hesitate to advise a boy either way. I would at 
most talk the matter over with him, ask him to take a 
long walk quite alone, and then tell me quite frankly 
what the inner voice prompted. 

My own feeling deepens that the artistic boy ought 
not to go to the ordinary college, — he runs too great a 
risk of missing art. And there are several other types 



336 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

of boy who ought not to enter college. There is the ob- 
vious type, the born adventurer, the boy in whom the 
blood flows at a livelier pace than in the rest of us. He 
wants the sea, the ranch, the mountains, the wilderness. 
And he has just as much right to his choice as the stu- 
dent has to his books. We must of course remember 
that a boy is often adventurer by mistake. He has per- 
haps tasted some of the routine affairs with which men 
busy themselves, and has naturally found them insipid. 
He jumps to the conclusion that the remote, unknown 
thing is what he wants. But the boy who has been prop- 
erly educated, who has been trained in spirit and body, 
who has had a sound foundation in intellectual culture 
at the high school, who has had the chastening experi- 
ence of the Wanderjahr, is not likely to make such a 
mistake. If with eyes open, he elects adventure, I feel 
that we are robbing him and perhaps robbing society 
of an important achievement, if we stand in the path 
of his desire. An adventurous boy is really much less 
common than elder persons are at first disposed to 
think. All small boys, who are not anaemic, are adven- 
turers, but as they grow older, they become amazingly 
conventional, and fall all too readily into commonplace, 
reprehensible schemes of life. For one thing, the ma- 
jority of boys have not been taught to think ; for an- 
other, they see older persons whom they have been led 
to respect, doing these things ; and for a third, their 
very limited experience makes occupations seem novel 
which soon prove very stale. To an ordinary boy of 
eighteen, keeping a country store would be an immense 
adventure, and if he is allowed, he will for some months 
serve his customers with all the fervor of an acolyte. 
We need never fear that a boy will make too big, too 



AFTERWARDS 337 

adventurous plans for his life, for if we know boys, we 
stand face to face with the certain knowledge that in 
nearly every single case, he will make much too small 
ones. Think how many novel adventures still remain to 
be tried, — the adventure of being truthful, the adventure 
of being honest, the adventure of not interfering with 
other people, the adventure of being happy, the solemn 
adventure of trying to know God. If a lively American 
boy should by any happy chance start out to be a Chris- 
tian, I venture to think that he would meet more gen- 
uinely novel adventures in a year than ever befell Sher- 
lock Holmes in his original and resurrected lifetime. If 
one doubts my hazard, one has only to read the Life of 
St. Francis. 

Closely allied to the artist and the adventurer is the 
boy of an inventive turn of mind. It is an open ques- 
tion with me whether he ought or ought not to go to 
college ; and once again, after due consultation, and the 
free expression of opinion, the decision must remain 
with him. In many cases he will be immensely helped 
by the systematic knowledge of a college training. This 
will be particularly true when he knows what results he 
wants to obtain, and is seeking for ways and means. 
In many cases he will be saved fruitless investigation, 
and will be set at once on the right track. In some 
cases, however, a boy of genius, or even of high talent, 
will simply be irritated and side-tracked. The more 
completely we apprehend the proper function of the 
college, the less willingly, I think, will we hold out col- 
lege life as a panacea. Its proper function is not to im- 
part knowledge. That is a tremendous, unforgivable 
blunder. Its proper function is still education, the un- 
folding and perfecting of the human spirit, the elimina- 



338 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

tion of provincialism, the setting-up of illuminating 
changes in a human soul. This is done, in part, through 
knowledge, but the knowledge must always figure as the 
means, not as the end. One might almost say that in 
proportion as the high school and the Wanderjalir had 
done their perfect work, the college would be imma- 
terial, because a boy with his spirit already on fire will 
continue to grow whatever he does, wherever he goes. 

It is important that we should not over-estimate the 
value of the college. It is plainly not for everybody. 
But when we have made all these reservations, and 
have eliminated artistic boys, adventurous boys, and 
some inventive boys, it remains true, I think, that for 
the large majority of average boys who honestly wish 
j to be educated (I leave out of consideration those who 
I prefer to remain provincial), the college, as a method, 
is the very best, and for a period of three years, from 
eighteen to twenty-one. Most of our colleges require 
four years, but this means the much abbreviated aca- 
demic year, minus a further month of holidays of one 
sort or another, and interrupted by a second installment 
of youthful distractions. Three years are quite sufficient 
for any reasonable course of undergraduate study, and 
particularly if the thing be done with any degree of 
concentration and thoroughness. 

I am not forgetting that as things now go, our whole- 
some lad of eighteen will be persona non grata at most 
of our American colleges. He will be educated, it is 
true, but he will not be informed along the required 
lines, and he will have to adjust himself as best he may. 
But I am confident that this is merely a transition pe- 
riod. I am looking forward to the emancipated college 
which will open its doors wide to all comers, and will 



AFTERWARDS 339 

devote its own immense energy to the fine art of pre- 
sentation, and not to the puerile task of rinding out just 
how little young persons of eighteen can, under very 
unfavorable conditions, remember. The pettiness of our 
present college life, with its absurd entrance examina- 
tions, its roll-calls, its espionage, its grave shaking of 
the head over trifles and its ignoring of essential things, 
its complete lack of the ideal of student freedom, its 
old-womanish way of setting conditions and fearing in- 
novations, is a shocking thing and demands the stern 
rebuke of every manly, freedom-loving scholar. The 
very expression, college requirements, is a disgraceful 
thing. It is the student who may properly be said to 
have requirements, since his spiritual development is 
the end, and it ought to be the high privilege of the 
college, as means, to minister to these requirements. If 
our education has meant anything at all, a boy of eight- 
een is prepared to use academic freedom, and to respect 
it. The proper business of the college is to offer graded 
instruction in every considerable department of human 
knowledge, to indicate by suitable nomenclature its own 
idea of the most profitable sequence in which these 
courses may be followed, and then to leave the question 
of choice and attendance to the student himself. It 
ought to be possible for any boy or girl over eighteen, 
for any man or woman short of senility, to take one, 
two, half a dozen courses, if he wishes, in any depart- 
ment he wishes, in the order he wishes. As I have 
elsewhere pointed out, there is small danger that any 
student will go in for second-year French before he has 
sufficiently mastered the first-year, or devote himself to 
the calculus before he has prepared himself to under- 
stand it. Young people are not so anxious to be bored 



340 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

or to waste their time. We Americans, who so plume 
ourselves upon our democracy and our love of freedom, 
might well take lessons from the universities of Conti- 
nental Europe. 

This deplorable idea, that every institution on earth 
— state, Church, family, school, college — must be 
eternally interfering with people and marching them 
along certain lines whether they will or not, shows to 
what a pass we have come intellectually, and how grave 
our spiritual needs. The function of all these institu- 
tions is the same, it is to set the individual free. Yet 
one and all deal chiefly in bonds. When one regards 
with any attention our elaborate social machinery, in 
politics, in industry, in religion, in family life, in edu- 
cation, and notes its far-reaching and persistent effort 
to crush that bird of the empyrean, the human soul, 
one is tempted for the moment to feel that the only pos- 
sible social creed is philosophic anarchism. This feeling 
particularly comes to the surface when one stands at 
the front door of an American college and observes the 
elaborate contrivances for keeping students out, the 
unnecessary barriers and annoyances after they get in, 
the interminable red tape, and the singular blindness 
to the real problems of education. 

But supposing our lad has decided to go to college 
and has been so fortunate as to get inside the door, the 
question as to how he shall spend these valuable three 
years is a most important one. 

The smaller colleges still claim omniscience and pre- 
scribe the whole course, but the larger colleges are pretty 
well committed to the elective system. In the flush of 
an early enthusiasm, the elective system was undoubt- 



AFTERWARDS 341 

edly carried too far, even down into the high school. 
That was a distinct mistake, for the curriculum is not 
a question for children to decide. They ought to be too 
absorbed in the act of living to have any eye for its 
machinery, and we elders ought during that period at 
least to have the better judgment. In the colleges them- 
selves there is now observable a decided disposition to 
hedge, in this matter of the elective system. Certain 
subjects are prescribed, and there is freedom of choice 
in the rest. It must be confessed that the system has 
not worked out as well as one could wish. I have 
watched its operation at Harvard, and have touched 
elbows with a number of failures. I found one of my 
boys, during his freshman year, taking five language 
courses, and nothing else. I found another boy, who 
much needed to have his feet on the ground, taking stud- 
ies all of them in the air, and growing each term more 
useless and bewildered. There was a period in which 
he could not be trusted to execute a simple errand, 
he was so sure to mess it. Nevertheless, I firmly believe 
that the elective system is the only sane one, and that 
the fault lies not in the system itself, but in the un- 
intelligent way in which it is so often carried out. I can 
only think that the advisers of those two boys mani- 
festly failed to do their duty. 

Bearing in mind that the sole object of this three- 
years college course is to free a boy's spirit from his 
previous limitations and provincialism, and to give him 
a firmer hold upon the realities of existence, it is clear 
that the ideal course must be essentially general ; and 
equally clear that somewhere in space, that is to say in 
some wise man's head, there must be a true formula 
for all boys which will indicate the broad avenues to 



342 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

freedom, while still leaving to the boys themselves the 
choice of the specific vehicle. Such a formula redeems 
the elective system from its vague formlessness, and 
gives it the backbone of plan and purpose. There will, 
of course, be differences of opinion as to what the true 
formula is, but any broadminded and experienced 
teacher can readily work out such a formula. The one 
which I worked out for my own boys presupposes 
from five and a half to six courses per year, and con- 
sists of the simple device of naming each course in gen- 
eral terms, and then leaving it to the boy to translate 
these general terms each year into specific studies. 
Thus the general formula runs as follows : — 

1. The mother tongue. 

2. A foreign language. 

3. A modern humanity. 

4. A form of mathematics. 

5. A laboratory science course. 
-~* 6. Fine arts. 

By way of a handle, I have named this formula " The 
Balanced Course," and it has, I think, several things to 
be said in its favor. It gives a symmetrical outline which 
each boy can fill in for himself. A dozen boys might be 
following this formula, and yet all be doing different 
things. Thus a typical freshman translation might be 
as follows : — 

1. A daily theme in English. 

2. A study of French prose. 

3. An introduction to philosophy. 

4. Solid geometry. 

5. A laboratory course in physics. 

6. Gothic architecture. 



AFTERWARDS 343 

I am far from thinking that this is the only rational 
formula, but I am free to confess that it seems to me 
to have many practical merits. This will be particularly 
the case if our lad, with the help of counsel, but with- 
out dictation, works out a well-coordinated scheme of 
studies in each of the six departments. The typical 
freshman translation of the formula, given above, may 
seem at first sight to represent a series of six wholly un- 
related studies taken quite at random. But this is far 
from being the case. They are unrelated in the sense 
that they represent six different sides of life, six dis- 
tinct facets, — and have been chosen on that very ac- 
count ; but even in the one year they form an organic 
unity in the sense that they are a balanced appeal to 
an intellect which aspires to catholicity. The real test of 
any particular translation of the general formula only 
crops out when it is compared with the specific work 
laid down for the other two years. The work in each of 
the six departments ought to present an orderly se- 
quence. If a boy were going in for philology, or for 
any research work which required Latin and Greek, he 
would, of course, have to change the suggested transla- 
tion, and substitute Latin for French, and Greek for 
architecture. It would be no violence to treat Greek as 
literature, and to class it under the fine arts. In the 
given case, I had in mind the needs of a boy who is 
going in for affairs, and who wants therefore a general 
all-round culture. In his second year he might profit- 
ably elect his studies somewhat as follows : — ■ 

1. Description and narrative. 

2. The French classical writers. 

3. Elementary psychology. 



344 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

4. Trigonometry. 

5. Inorganic qualitative analysis. 

6. Italian painters. 

It will depend, of course, upon the boy's individual 
taste and the probable direction of his life-work. In the 
third year, on the same principle, he might take these 
studies : — 



Si 



1. Drama, the novel, and versification. 

2. French composition and the modern dramatists. 

3. Elements of economics. 

4. Calculus. 

5. General biology. 

6. A comparative study of Elizabethan and Victorian 
literature. 

If these eighteen courses were well given, and our 
lad had himself tight in hand to profit by them, he 
would not be a completely educated young person at 
the end of the three years, but he would, I think, be a 
well-educated young person for his age. It would be an 
important element of his education to understand ex- 
actly how limited such an education was, and to realize 
that he stood only on the threshold of the intellectual 
kingdom. He ought to be made to feel that the im- 
mense treasures of human knowledge are his, not actu- 
ally, but only potentially, that he has had a method of 
study presented to him, and that his future discipline 
now lies wholly in his own hands. 

In selecting his college studies, and in making his 
individual translation of the general formula, a lad not 
only may make some mistakes, but he most certainly 
will. This is a part of the price that we must all pay in 
the cultivation of the judgment, — the price of many 



AFTERWARDS 345 

mistakes. But the task of selecting his studies, and of 
doing it on some rational plan, brings a boy both judg- 
ment and discrimination, and impresses him with the 
fact that the whole conduct of life is one long series of 
decisions. This really constitutes the difficulty. Happy 
the man or maid who early learns how to decide quickly 
and well. In making out his own curriculum, a boy not 
only learns the necessity for choice, but he also learns 
that the mere omission to decide is in itself a decision, 
and sometimes of the most damaging sort. And he also 
comes to appreciate the weighty importance of negative 
decisions. If, for example, he can allow himself but one 
course in fine arts, the decision to take Italian painters 
cuts out all other possible courses, and so gives a slightly 
different twist to the whole after current of his life. 
Perhaps in one of the neighboring lecture-rooms some 
rare spirit is giving an impassioned course on Dante, 
or Browning, or the art and tradition of St. Francis 
of Assisi, a course that would have fired the imagination 
of our lad, and led to great things, — yet he missed it ! 
By what we omit to do, as well as by what we elect, is 
our fate born. It is for all of us a tremendous lesson to 
learn that in reality we are the children of our own 
experience. A lad cannot too early learn this lesson. 
By marshaling before him the alternatives of experience 
and picturing their effects upon a temperament such as 
his, he can by his own choice fashion his soul according 
to one pattern or another. Slowly he comes to be the 
captain of his fate. 

I am so much emphasizing this question of election 
because it is an element in education and a potent dis- 
cipline, which we commonly make far too little of. In 
reality, it is the cultivation of the will, and we might 



346 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

almost say that upon it everything depends. If a boy 
has a strong will, and back of it a disciplined, humane 
spirit, we easily predict his success. Or if a boy have a 
weak will, we know all too surely that in the absence 
of any strengthening tonic, he is as good as done for. 
And yet, knowing these things perfectly well, we con- 
cern ourselves with minor matters of erudition and 
scholarship, and make no concerted attack upon the 
real citadel of destiny, the will. It were better for a 
boy to make eighteen grave mistakes in selecting his 
eighteen college courses, and come out of the discipline 
with an instructed will and a sound knowledge of the 
fundamental principles upon which decisions ought to 
be made, than to follow the most faultless course laid 
out for him, and emerge from it full of knowledge but 
empty of will-power. It is a basal question, one of prime 
importance in education, and rests, like all other basal 
questions, upon religion, upon our essential attitude 
towards life. To develop the will is not only one of the 
subtlest tasks, but it is also one of the most momentous 
and far-reaching. If a boy is taught to rely solely upon 
God or Providence, and not upon himself ; if he is taught 
that all things work together for good, in spite of his 
blunders and incompetence ; if he is taught that evolu- 
tion, progress, civilization, or whatever we call the for- 
ward movement of humanity, is inevitable and already 
amply provided for, then manifestly his own will is a 
very casual and capricious thing, and not in any prac- 
tical way an integral part of the divine plan. The boy 
is not necessary to God, and in the great cosmic drama 
being played out around us, it really matters very little 
what he does. It might be very jolly to lend a hand to 
anything so big and fine, but since the thing is bound 



AFTERWARDS &17 

to happen anyway, the lad, if he is intelligent, must 
eventually be struck with the utter futility of what he 
is doing, and finally, out of sheer logic, desist. Why cul- 
tivate the will and pray each day, Thy will he clone, if 
we conceive that the divine will and our own are alien, 
unrelated forces. But that is not what Lord Buddha and 
Lord Jesus taught. They both taught that what a man 
sows, he reaps. Nor is it what science teaches. Science 
teaches that given causes are inevitably followed by cor- 
responding effects; and that desired effects must be 
preceded by adequate causes. The doctrine of the will 
is basal, a matter of religion. And I do not see how 
we can evade its implications, and lend effective hand 
to either education or religion. 

It may seem to timid souls who have been taught to 
lean upon some power not themselves, rather than upon 
the ever-present immanent God, an audacious precept 
to teach a boy that his own will is an integral, deter- 
mining part of the divine will, and that upon the swift- 
ness and sanity and intelligence of his own decisions, 
the good fortune of the world depends ; but audacious 
as such a precept undoubtedly is, it seems to me un- 
avoidable. 

The effect of such a conception of the will upon our 
conception of education is profound and far-reaching. 
We parents and teachers, busy with the outer details 
of home and school life, ourselves perhaps a bit near- 
sighted and unambitious, are really trafficking in noth- 
ing less august than Destiny itself. We fumble and 
turn aside to minor, irrelevant issues, the majority of 
us, and so delay the coming of the Great State, and 
the prevalence of educated persons upon the earth ; but 
in spite of all evasions and subterfuges, our major func- 



348 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

tion remains the same, and occasionally gets itself real- 
ized. It is to teach this wholesome lad of ours the 
omnipotence of will, of Ms will, and that the gorgeous 
world spread out before him with its mixture of the 
delectable and the unwelcome is in reality the unerr- 
ing manifestation of a collective will, of the combined 
will of men and angels and gods. To cultivate this will 
of his, to chasten, discipline, rationalize, educate it, is 
really the major business of both his moral and his 
practical life. It is to show itself in his daily, hourly, 
momentary decisions. Why should a boy go to college ? 
— if the boy does not know this, his will can hardly be 
said to be engaged in the adventure, and there is small 
promise of success. Why should he not go to college ? 
Why should he take or omit any particular course of 
study ? The hour is crowded with infinite alternatives. 
Why should he select one, and so, by necessity, reject 
all the rest? 

I have suggested my own general formula of study 
on the theory that a boy can best utilize the three years 
of his college life if he lay the broad foundations of 
culture, rather than by specializing. This may be a 
good theory or a bad theory. The boy must begin by 
deciding. If it seems to him a bad theory, then he must 
evolve a better one, or several better ones, and if sev- 
eral he must decide which, all things considered, is the 
best. If my theory seem good, — the best theory, in 
fact, — then the next step is to inquire whether the 
general formula really carries out this theory, whether 
it really insures a balanced course, or whether there is 
another formula offering still greater balance and pro- 
portion. It does not exhaust the range of proper hu- 
man interests to appeal to a boy's literary and human- 



AFTERWARDS 349 

istic and quantitative and scientific and aBsthetic sense, 
but it seems to me that a boy developed on these five 
sides would be at least in the way of being educated. 
But he will be the better educated if he is led to weigh 
the given formula against any reasonable alternatives 
which he can upon reflection himself propose. When it 
comes to turning the formula into specific studies, the 
eighteen decisions are very individual and can only 
properly be made by the boy himself. But he may even 
here follow some sound general principle. To say that 
a certain choice ought to be individual does not imply 
that it is to be capricious. I propose, therefore, to ex- 
amine the possible translations in each department and 
to indicate in a broad way the method of choosing. 

In the matter of English, I assume that an educated 
person would wish, almost before anything else, to use 
the mother tongue well ; and that in his leisure mo- 
ments, he is reading for pleasure the principal litera- 
ture of both America and Great Britain. On this as- 
sumption the work in English reduces to the practical 
art of composition, and to securing sufficient leisure for 
the reading of the English classics. The lad has al- 
ready been taught to speak and to write clear, unam- 
biguous English, but in the majority of cases he still 
needs larger practice and greater flexibility. The work 
may well begin, then, with the writing of a daily theme, 
covering a wide variety of subjects, and dressing itself 
in the conventional literary forms. In the second year, 
there is properly a parting of the ways, and the lad 
should select his path in strict accordance with his own 
literary taste, and such prevision as he may have of 
what his future work is to be. If he is thinking of jour- 
nalism, he will do well to try his hand at the typical 



350 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

tasks of journalism, at description, narrative, editorial 
comment, reporting, summarizing, book reviewing, dra- 
matic and musical criticism. If he pictures himself as a 
man of letters, he may well busy himself with the pro- 
duction of such forms in literature as he hopes some 
day to excel in, — verse, novel, essay, drama. My own 
feeling is that volume ought to be accounted important 
as well as quality. There is a certain sweep, a certain 
sense of easy command which only come with volumi- 
nousness, and both qualities are desirable. A writer who 
uses his pen only occasionally, and with too studied tem- 
perance, is open to the same danger which sits so heav- 
ily upon the silent man who looks so tremendously 
wise and who breaks the illusion, from time to time, by 
speech. And both, all too easily, become sententious, 
which is a very grievous malady. The voluminous 
writer not only falls into the habit of saying with agree- 
able freedom what he has to say, but he is less tempted 
to regard every utterance as a masterpiece. It has al- 
i ways seemed to me that writers would do well to follow 
J the example of their fellow-artists, the painters. They 
are after the same thing, the expression of ideas and 
emotions, the one in words, the other in line and color. 
Now the painter sketches incessantly without making 
the mistake of preserving all his sketches, or of offering 
any considerable number of them for sale. Writers, I 
think, might profitably do the same, not only during 
their novitiate, when they are forming their style, but 
throughout their career. 

A word might be said, too, in praise of verse-making. 
The effort after rhyme and rhythm makes one sensitive 
to sound, — one comes sooner to write English that will 
read well aloud, — and it also makes the vocabulary 



AFTERWARDS 351 

larger and more discriminating. If in writing the boy 
will fancy himself speaking, or try mentally to hear the 
sound of what he writes, he will save himself many in- 
felicities. If the finished composition can stand the test 
of being read aloud, the young author may be quite sure 
that it is not entirely bad. During the third year our 
prospective journalist and man of letters may well oc- 
cupy themselves with a critical and analytic study of the 
best things that other writers have done. Here again 
I should recommend a wide study rather than a too- 
detailed one. A boy may well select a newspaper which 
he particularly admires and day by day study its method 
and its linguistic habits. A boy who fancies himself a 
dramatist will naturally be the devoted disciple of a 
chosen master, but he would better learn as well how 
other masters have done it. And he would better fre- 
quent the theater and observe how plays already familiar 
to him work out on the actual stage. There is some- 
thing to be said in favor of both embryo journalist and 
man of letters concerning themselves with newspapers 
and dramas which do not at first appeal to them, and 
in general with all literature severely criticized. They 
will do well to remember that the majority is always 
wrong, and the minority sometimes right. A newspaper 
may offend by its ugly type and poor paper and crude 
advertising, and yet report the day's news with unusual 
precision, and offer in its editorial column the best 
thought of the hour ; while a more fastidious sheet may 
really be full of social and economic unsoundness. Our 
lad is almost a man, now, — he will be a voter on his 
next birthday, — and it behooves him to have no aver- 
sions which he cannot justify and no enthusiasms which 
he cannot defend. It is well, I think, at this particular 



352 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

stage of the linguistic journey, to devote small time to 
the history of literature, or the books of a past greatness. 
The attention is better given to very modern and con- 
temporaneous products, in both English and foreign 
languages, reading the best available translation when 
he cannot read the original. Boys are very conservative. 
They may not care for this modern output as much as 
for those older classics which they have already learned 
to love. But it will be the better course educationally. 
And I would even go so far as to say that the more this 
modern work displeases a boy, irritates him, shocks him, 
enrages him, the more probable is it that an old preju- 
dice is being brought face to face with a new truth. 
Platitudes leave us quite unruffled and if in some novel 
dress may even for the moment tickle our fancy. But 
the big ideas we nearly always fight. A little truth holds 
out against a big truth, prejudice against reality. It has 
been my own experience that the people who disturb 
me, and the literature which at first arouses my antag- 
onism have become in the end my best teachers. 

To summarize these very general remarks, it would 
seem to me wise for a lad to strive for mastery in the 
use of the mother tongue, that practical mastery which 
expresses itself in a literary style made sound and dur- 
able by a worthy content, and to strive with his whole 
heart. And I would especially have him avoid any resem- 
blance to Bernard Shaw's definition of an Elizabethan, 
— "A man with an extraordinary and imposing power 
of saying things, and with nothing whatever to say." 

In the choice of a foreign language, there is large 
propriety in individual preference. A boy who goes in 
for a balanced course in order to make himself an edu- 
cated person rather than a specialist, may not devote 



AFTERWARDS 353 

more than two out of his six courses to language, and 
as one of these two must obviously be English, there 
remains only one course for the foreign language, and 
according to the scheme I am here advocating, he has 
but three years at that. Unless there is special reason 
why he should take Latin or Greek, he would much 
better devote his very limited time to the mastery of a 
modern tongue, French or German or Italian or Spanish. 
It is far more rational to master one of these and really 
share its literature than to dabble in two or three and 
gain little more than a phrase-book knowledge. Which 
language to select ought to depend upon a boy's interest. 
He already knows French pretty well, and elementary 
German. In three years, he can therefore either perfect 
himself in one of these languages or he can gain a fair 
mastery of Italian or Spanish. If a boy plans to be a 
man of letters, or to go in for architecture or any of the 
fine arts, French would ordinarily be the best choice. If, 
on the other hand, his bent is for music or science, he 
will probably study later in Germany and it would be 
an immense help if he could go armed with a thorough 
knowledge of the language. There are easily imaginable 
circumstances under which Italian or Spanish would be 
the part of wisdom. To have a smattering of several 
languages is not education ; it is merely one of the many 
forms of intellectual dissipation. But it is education to 
know, in addition to the vernacular, one other language, 
to know it so thoroughly that one can think in it, can 
speak it and read it and write it, without first carrying 
on the thought process in English and translating as 
nimbly as one can. It is said, and may be true, that one 
can only know one's own language thoroughly when one 
knows one other. It is also said, and is probably not 



354 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

true, that with each language acquired, a man gains a 
new soul. He gains something, but hardly such an im- 
mensity as that. 

I place great stress upon those studies which I have 
denominated as the modern humanities, — philosophy, 
logic, ethics, psychology, economics, government, and 
sociology, — for they have to deal so directly with the 
operations of the human spirit that they cannot be other 
than unfolding and perfecting. They seem to me vastly 
more valuable and instructive than the detailed study 
of history. In their very nature, they are generalizations 
of the highest order, and as such are both economic and 
helpful. History is necessarily and hopelessly concrete. 
History repeats itself with a vengeance, and such lessons 
as it does teach, it teaches with quite unpardonable 
waste of time, and in such vague and uncertain fashion 
that frequently the lesson is either lost or misunderstood. 
Even in college, it seems to me that history ought to be 
offered as literature, and as such in its most finished 
form, in the department of fine arts. In selecting the 
courses in the humanities, I have suggested general 
philosophy, elementary psychology and economics as 
profitable ground for the three undergraduate years. 
It would be easy of course to occupy the whole time to 
advantage with any one of these amazingly rich subjects, 
but if the purpose be general culture, an introduction 
to the methods and problems of all three would be more 
valuable than the detailed study of any one. At best, 
the knowledge gained in college is but a point of de- 
parture for more extended study outside. With such 
a preparation the lad would be qualified to go on in all 
three studies, and also, when leisure arrived, to under- 
take general reading in logic, government, and sociology. 



AFTERWARDS 355 

There might be particular and adequate reasons for sub- 
stituting any one of these for anyone of the three human- 
ities suggested. A prospective lawyer might profitably 
choose psychology, economics, and government, while 
a clergyman-to-be might prefer philosophy, logic, and 
ethics. The major point is not only to give the boy in- 
struction in these departments, but even more to keep 
this humanistic side alive in him, and not allow him 
to forget that, rightly handled, all the problems of life 
are human. We forget this in many of our present-day 
institutions. In our busy America we have inverted so 
many things. Our industry expresses itself in terms of 
profits, instead of use. Our public education turns out 
book-keepers and artisans instead of men. Our laws — 
over 90 per cent of them, I believe — have to do with 
property. Our very churches rent or sell their pews, 
deal in mortgages and leases, pay large salaries to min- 
ister and choir, accept money without asking its source, 
and have otherwise forgotten that their real function is 
with the human soul. I feel that however well-informed 
and well-intentioned a young person may be, he is as- 
suredly not educated unless his final thought is essen- 
tially humanistic. Whatever combination he may elect 
it would be wise for him to consider carefully the claims 
of psychology and economics, for they have to do fun- 
damentally with the affairs of daily life. 

It is not customary to include mathematics in the 
curriculum of an avowed litterateur, but it has an un- 
escapable claim upon every curriculum. It represents 
the quantitative element in life and as such none of 
us can afford to dispense with it. Science is only quan- 
titative, organized knowledge, as compared to every- 
day experience, but we all recognize the immense dif- 



356 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

f erence. In science indeed the old dictum still holds ; 
we have only so much science as we have mathematics. 
It is not too much to say then that a mind not trained 
in mathematics cannot be a scientific mind and its pos- 
sessor can hardly be accounted an educated person. 
When we accuse any one of being unscientific, what we 
really mean is that he is inexact. 

It is a common impression that mathematics is dif- 
ficult, and requires some special faculty for its com- 
prehension. As a result of this error boys are allowed 
to graduate from college with very inadequate mathe- 
matical knowledge, and the lazy belief that they have 
done as well or better to put the time into more lan- 
guages. This seems to me highly mischievous reasoning, 
for in the very nature of the case, nothing can take the 
place of mathematics. A boy might study Greek until 
he knew it — which would be a considerable and un- 
common accomplishment — and still be a very partial 
and unreliable thinker if he deliberately threw over the 
accurate, quantitative element in thought. When you 
bear in mind that science and mathematics have to do 
with time and space, with matter and motion, and that 
these are the ultimate terms in that three-dimensional 
world which we daily experience, and from which all 
our raw material of thought eventually comes, it is very 
clear that the omission of science and mathematics from 
one's intellectual equipment is a fatal omission and con- 
demns a man to a permanent place on the sick-list. A 
boy who pleads inaptitude for mathematical study, and 
begs some more congenial substitute, really pleads lazi- 
ness and begs to be freed from any conception of the 
only accurate relations in life we are privileged to know, 
that is to say, the measured relations. To grant his 



AFTERWARDS 357 

prayer is a very grave unkindness. Nor is it correct to 
maintain that even the higher mathematics is difficult. 
It is only difficult if it is badly presented, or if the 
student decline accurate, concentrated thinking. A boy 
is soon beyond his depth if he allows his thought to 
wander to other things when he is supposed to be 
studying, or in the class-room itself gives only a frac- 
tion of his attention. This means, on the face of it, that 
he has been badly brought up. Any lad who has had 
proper training up to eighteen, whose tasks have genu- 
inely engaged his spirit, will go through a stiff, three- 
years course in mathematics at college with profit and 
delight. If he has mastered plane geometry in the high 
school, he will find the solid geometry of freshman year 
so very easy that it may fittingly occupy but one semes- 
ter, and allow the second semester for plane trigonome- 
try. He will hardly need spherical trigonometry, unless 
he means to be a civil engineer or an astronomer. It is 
not in the strict sequence of mathematical thought, and 
may be renounced as a luxury. 

If a boy takes analytics and perhaps some higher 
algebra during the second year, he will be ready in the 
third year for the most important of all the mathematical 
work, the study of the calculus. As a culture study cal- 
culus has never received the attention which it so well 
deserves. It is commonly thought of as a somewhat ab- 
struse and remote branch of higher mathematics, useful 
as a tool in the investigation of certain mechanical, and 
physical problems, but with little or no claim upon stu- 
dents who are not engineers or physicists. In reality 
the calculus is not only an important tool in such in- 
vestigations but is also a distinct and novel way of 
thinking about quantity, and as such deserves to be 



358 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

mastered by every one who aspires to think, that is to 
say, by every scholar, by every educated person. As a 
tool, the calculus solves so many knotty problems with 
such extraordinary speed and ease that one has the feel- 
ing of dabbling in the black arts. The answers come 
as if by magic. But in reality there is nothing at all 
occult or mysterious about either branch of the cal- 
culus. They have the high simplicity of really great 
things. If geometry has been well taught in the high 
school, there was a little foretaste of calculus modes of 
thought in the limbering up of the notions of quantity 
into something fluid and variable. The rigid, hard-and- 
fast conception of quantity begins to disappear. This 
in itself is an intellectual step in advance. The calculus 
carries this process to the logical and liberating ex- 
treme. It not only studies constants and variables, but 
the shifting relations between variables themselves, and 
so gives a flexibility and freedom to our mathematical 
conceptions which no other study possibly can. Valuing 
all studies, as I do, for their reaction upon the student, 
I feel that the calculus is as valuable for those who wish 
to think adequately as for those who use it as a tool in 
technical research. 

The main argument for science study I have already 
given. It is not utilitarian or industrial, ■ — it is intel- 
lectual. We live in a world of matter and motion, that 
is to say, of matter in motion, or energy. If we do not 
trouble ourselves to know the forms of energy, its make- 
up, its transformations, its laws, we not only deprive 
ourselves of keen intellectual pleasure, but also of in- 
tellectual validity. We cannot philosophize with any 
degree of helpfulness about a world of which we delib- 
erately remain ignorant. This is so very obvious that I 



AFTERWARDS 359 

marvel that all clergymen, teachers, editors, economists, 
and other would-be leaders do not recognize its truth 
and acquaint themselves with at least the large facts of 
science before they attempt to cope with the larger prob- 
lem of destiny. Mr. Arnold had a capital name for 
those pseudo-sentences which express no thought, — he 
called them noise, and as mere noise much of the cur- 
rent comment on the deeper things of life must appear 
to even a moderately educated person, for he realizes 
that the commentator is handling words and not any 
vital conception of things. This is so deplorable a fault 
that we parents and teachers ought to guard ourselves 
against it, if need be with fasting and prayer, and keep 
our children from it as from malaria and typhoid. 

In the course of some geological work in eastern Ken- 
tucky I stopped for dinner one day at the cabin of an 
old mountaineer. The mountain people are always hos- 
pitable, but on this occasion I had a double welcome, for 
the old man wanted my opinion about some ore. He 
had no specimens at hand, but promised to take me, 
after dinner, out to the deposits themselves. I was cu- 
rious to know what the ore was, and why he thought it 
valuable, but the old man did not know. A passing ge- 
ologist, it seems, had declared the ore to be " the richest 
thing he had ever seen." When questioned by the old 
man, the geologist had admitted that he did not know just 
what the ore was, but repeated his statement in regard 
to its value. It is needless to add that I found some very 
lean kidney iron ore, not at all worth picking up. One 
does not meet such naive asseveration in cultivated draw- 
ing-rooms, but one can often detect an exact counterpart. 

A boy cannot cover science in three years, one course 
a year, but under able teachers he can gain an intro- 



360 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

duction to some of the major facts and can acquire the 
habit of sound scientific thought. The specific subjects 
are less important than the manner of their presenta- 
tion. For college boys this should always be in the form 
of carefully worked-out laboratory courses. The boy 
is elsewhere dealing with the symbols of things, with 
words. In science, he ought to deal with the things 
themselves. For obvious reasons my own preference 
would be for general physics, general inorganic chem- 
istry, and general biology. A boy who has a sound con- 
ception of energy, of the composition and reactions of 
matter, and of the manifestation of the life force in 
plant and animal, is on the road to a sound conception 
of the outer world. It goes without saying, that these 
courses must be well given if a lad is to gain the 
desired insight. As a rule, they are not well given. 
This seems to be particularly the case with physics. 
Inherently there is no more fascinating subject in 
the whole curriculum, and yet I am led to think that 
the majority of boys hate physics, and are as little 
touched by it as if they had never worked in those 
palatial laboratories which doubtless serve some end, 
but manifestly do not serve them. It is never safe to 
generalize, but I venture to think that the trouble comes 
from a failure to appeal to the spirit. The boys expe- 
rience a multitude of details, but fail in the end to see 
the forest for the trees. Not apprehending any plan and 
purpose in the work, they simply become confused and 
bewildered. Unless the instruction has mended very re- 
cently, you will still find boys working away in these 
fine laboratories, with all the outward show of industry, 
but who prove, when you question them, not to know 
what they are doing. I once taught physics for several 



AFTERWARDS 361 

years in a high school, and wrote an indifferent text- 
book on the subject, so I know how difficult, how al- 
most impossible, it is to teach it well ; but the great im- 
portance of the subject as a culture study entitles it to 
the most mature art that can be brought to bear upon 
the teaching and to the personal service of the senior 
physicist. 

Stated in the most concrete terms, physics has to do 
with the properties of matter, and since these depend 
primarily upon motion, it really reduces to a study of 
energy, the ultimate content of the material universe. 
A knowledge of physics is then an integral part of a 
complete intelligence and may not be omitted on any 
pretext whatever. The operations in the physical labo- 
ratory have many outward and apparently dissimilar 
forms, but they are all essentially measurements, a form 
of applied mathematics. Physics represents that ac- 
curate, realistic statement of experience which laziness 
prompts a man to escape by easier flights of the undis- 
ciplined imagination. It is true that in no study is im- 
agination more valuable than in physics, for we are 
called upon to image things beyond the range of vision, 
to hear things outside the limits of sound, to handle 
things too small to be tangible, to deal with magnitudes 
too great to be conceived; but the quick imagination 
which enables us to accomplish these impossible tasks 
has first to be disciplined by a thousand checks and ex- 
periments, and guarded at all stages from indulging in 
mere fantasy. The boy who declines physics on the 
shallow ground that he has no natural aptitude for the 
study is in the same case with the boy who declines 
mathematics, — and is very often the same individual. 
What he really does is to decline the exact quantita- 



362 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

tive aspect of experience, and elect deliberately to live 
ignorantly in a world of matter and motion. I need not 
further emphasize the incompleteness and essential un- 
soundness of the resulting intelligence. 

I have suggested chemistry as the proper science 
study for the second year. Strictly speaking it is a de- 
partment of physics and can more readily be grasped 
after one has mastered the fundamental generalizations 
of physics. It is usual to say that chemistry concerns 
itself with the composition of matter, and is therefore a 
study of the elements and their possible combinations. 
But chemistry has only become a science since these 
reactions have been studied in the light of their absorp- 
tion or liberation of energy. Such a study shows that all 
reactions are determined by physical conditions, and 
consequently, when we know the conditions, we can pre- 
dict the result with the same certainty that an astrono- 
mer predicts an eclipse. If I may^ hark back to an old 
illustration I would again call attention to the case of 
a burning gas-jet. It exemplifies both the first law of 
thermo-chemistry and the general law of evolution. The 
gas consists essentially of carbon and hydrogen, both 
readily combustible. In the common fish-tail burner, 
the escaping gas does not at once come into sufficient 
contact with the oxygen of the air to permit both ele- 
ments to be burned. What happens ? As we all know, 
the hydrogen burns first with an intensely hot flame, 
while the carbon precipitates as solid particles in this 
flame, and by their incandescence these particles ren- 
der the flame luminous. The carbon only burns after 
the hydrogen is quite satisfied, that is to say when the 
particles reach the outer edge of the flame. But why 
does it always happen that the hydrogen burns first 



AFTERWARDS 363 

and the carbon second ? The ultimate reason is of course 
unknown, but the proximate reason is physical. It 
seems that when two reactions are apparently possible, 
as the burning of the hydrogen and the burning of the 
carbon, that reaction will take place first which will lib- 
erate the greater amount of energy and yield the more 
condensed product. The burning hydrogen yields the 
greater amount of heat and the more condensed product, 
a vapor which soon condenses into liquid water. The 
burning carbon not only produces less heat, but it also 
yields a product, carbon dioxide, which under usual con- 
ditions remains essentially a gas. When we supply suf- 
ficient air, as in the Bunsen burner, the two elements 
burn simultaneously and give us the well-known color- 
less flame. This simple reaction also illustrates the law 
of evolution, which is, in Herbert Spencer's well-known 
phraseology, the passage of matter from an indefinite, 
incoherent homogeneity to a definite, coherent hetero- 
geneity, accompanied by the dissipation of motion or 
heat. 

In chemistry we deal with the same fluid, poetic 
world of variables that we deal with in the calculus. 
While we do not profess to know what matter is, we 
have long since parted company with the hard-and-fast 
idea of separate elements, and have developed the con- 
ception of elements differing only in their manifestation 
of energy and therefore, in the complex process of the 
world, not only susceptible, but foreordained to in- 
numerable transmutations. To the chemist, the visible 
universe is what it is, simply for the present moment 
of time, and is constantly breaking down and building 
up into another and quite different universe. To be ed- 
ucated, one must share this larger and more fluid con- 



364 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

ception. If through indifference or inertia, or undue 
preoccupation with the intricacies of language, or the 
murderous details of history, a boy prefers to ignore 
the mystery and marvel of matter, and to rest unreflec- 
tively in the assumption that bricks are bricks, and 
stones stones, he is, of course, a free elector, but it is 
important that we persons of a larger experience should 
point out to him the significance of his act and that he 
is defeating the purpose which he presumably set out to 
attain, his own education. There are, of course, only a 
very few educated persons on the planet at any one 
time, just as there are only a few distinguished persons 
now in the United States, but the mischief comes not 
alone from the prevailing ignorance, but quite as much 
from the prevailing illusion of knowledge. It is not 
possible in a year to become either physicist or chemist, 
but it is possible under an able teacher to master the 
larger facts in these sciences, and to gain some degree 
of soundness and catholicity in one's thinking. 

In the third year, general biology seems to me not 
only an illuminating course, but one quite as essential 
to right thinking and wise thinking as are physics and 
chemistry. But it should follow these two sciences since 
it really rests upon them as foundations. The wall be- 
tween the inorganic world and living matter is always 
being attacked, and seems always on the point of fall- 
ing, but somehow it never quite does, and we are still 
called upon to recognize and study a distinct class of 
phenomena in that portion of the material universe 
permeated by the life force. The reactions are too dis- 
tinctive to be ignored. When the life force is added to 
this pageant of matter and motion, we have the great 
drama of every-day existence. It involves human bodies 



AFTERWARDS 365 

and all that is needed to nourish and clothe them, much 
that is needed to shelter and equip them. It involves 
the animals which serve and befriend them, the plants 
which shade and delight them. We may properly claim 
for biology that it practically touches all the arts of 
daily life; and when we think of the life force operating 
in men and women as sex, we are brought face to face, 
in biology, with some of the deepest and most far-reach- 
ing problems of our individual and social life. With life 
as a fact and an art the boy who is properly brought up 
has already come into rational and sympathetic relation. 
At twenty and twenty-one he is prepared to consider life 
from the standpoint of science, and in the light of his 
recently acquired physical and chemical knowledge, to 
understand the fundamental generalizations of modern 
research. It is hardly conceivable that any scholar, 
seeking the fullest knowledge of his day and genera- 
tion, should willingly remain ignorant of biological proc- 
esses. Yet the number of students in our universities 
who go in for biological work is discouragingly small. 
One can gain illuminating information on this point by 
studying any college or university catalogue, and com- 
paring the number of students enrolled in biology with 
the total number. 

In urging the specific study of biology, it is worth 
remarking that contemporaneous philosophic thought 
not only anticipates no breaking down of the wall be- 
tween the organic and the inorganic, but is disposed, 
on the contrary, to hold to the belief that they are essen- 
tially separate, that life indeed is the unique creative 
force, and that matter is, as it were, a residuum. The 
reader will find an interesting discussion of this view 
in Bergson's "Creative Evolution." 



366 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

I am not, I think, placing undue emphasis upon sci- 
entific study. I was myself brought up in the camp of 
the scientists and early learned to value their funda- 
mental honesty and large intelligence. It has so chanced 
that much of my subsequent life has been spent with 
persons who are not scientific, and by contrast with the 
friends of my youth I have come to recognize their de- 
ficient realism. 

The sixth department, the fine arts, appears in all 
three years, and in spite of the pressure of what many 
would consider more important studies, it readily holds 
its own in any balanced cultural course. Here the se- 
quence in the three years, and the specific subjects, are 
less important perhaps than elsewhere because the 
major idea is not informational or historic. The whole 
purpose is to keep alive the love of the beautiful, to 
enlarge and deepen it, and by intimate contact with 
the work of the masters to inspire a boy with the desire 
to undertake some form of art work on his own ac- 
count. It is not necessary to cover any large ground, 
but it is important to be thorough, and to get at the very 
heart of the matter. There is great wealth of material 
in painting, sculpture, architecture, music, and literature. 
The study of the Italian painters of a given period, of 
Greek sculpture, of Gothic architecture, of Wagnerian 
music, of modern Scandinavian drama, to mention a 
few out of many, would offer rich harvests to an alert 
and appreciative boy. America is not a beautiful coun- 
try, but it is a country of large possibilities of beauty. 
Over the length and breadth of the land, man has laid 
his devastating touch upon forest and field, mountain 
side and water front. In dwellings, factories, warehouses, 
shops, churches, and public buildings he has erected 



AFTERWARDS 367 

creations which smite the very spirit- But there is also 
discernible the promise of better things. I have re- 
cently been making a somewhat extended tour through 
the Southern States, and I have been pleasantly im- 
pressed with the noticeable improvement in the federal 
buildings. The post-office at Atlanta, for example, 
might almost be classed with the Boston Library. The 
post-offices at Macon, Savannah, Brunswick, Jackson- 
ville, though less beautiful, are still admirable. There 
is a similar marked improvement in the banks and of- 
fice buildings. We are awakening in spots to some ap- 
preciation of beauty, and to the need of working for its 
attainment. But the prevailing major note in all sec- 
tions of the country is one of hopeless, sordid ugliness. 
It is particularly timely that every lad who goes to col- 
lege should be developed on his aesthetic side, and 
should be made to feel that, as a fresh citizen of the 
Kepublic, he must work for aesthetic integrity as well 
as for civic righteousness. 

It is a matter for national regret that our old build- 
ings are so much more beautiful than the newer struc- 
tures put up by householders and civic authorities. 
Here in Macon, for example, up on the Hill, I am sur- 
rounded by mansions of the ante-bellum period, ex- 
amples of Southern colonial architecture, full of beauty 
and dignity, while touching elbows with them are the 
newer, more pretentious, less beautiful dwellings of a 
later and less sensitive time. One sees a similar falling- 
off in New England. The beautiful houses are almost 
invariably the old houses. It cannot be an accident 
that the old towns I have just visited in Texas, Loui- 
siana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia are so much 
more beautiful than their newer rivals. In Texas and 



368 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

California one has only to compare the fine old missions 
with the newer church buildings to decide whether the 
human spirit in America has been growing more or 
less sensitive to beauty. Some years ago I went to Porto 
Rico for the Government and made a tour of the island, 
speaking on behalf of our newer forms of education. 
Everywhere I found immense enthusiasm for education, 
and no end of new school buildings ; but from the ex- 
pensive normal school at Rio Piedras, down to the 
most modest district school, the new buildings were dis- 
tinctly less beautiful than the old buildings erected un- 
der Spanish rule. The normal school was particularly 
ugly. It looked as if some malignant cyclone had lifted 
it from the crudest corner of our own frontier districts 
and landed it, an ungainly intruder, amid the semi- 
tropic beauty of the island. Now this absence of beauty 
in the outer world which we are creating is not a matter 
of no importance or even of small importance. Beauty 
in color and proportion, like beauty in literary style, is 
a matter of the spirit. Its absence means a poverty of 
the spirit. Every lover of America is bound, it seems 
to me, to do all he can to deepen our national sense 
of beauty, and all he can to heighten our ability to 
achieve beauty. 

In many Japanese prints there is observable a per- 
fectly blank space, — in rare instances, even two. I for- 
merly took these spaces for water, or if that were out of 
the question, for clouds. They are, of course, nothing 
of the sort. The Japanese are much too fond of the line 
and color in wave forms, and the possibilities in clouds, 
to lose any opportunity to portray them. In reality, 
these blank spaces are simply regions which seemed to the 



AFTERWARDS 369 

artist to contain nothing of interest, and so he naively left 
them bare. In looking over our educational schemes 
one comes upon many such bare spots. A notable one is 
the long vacation. In most of our American colleges it 
separates the short years of effort by intervals of three 
and even four months. Personally I believe that these 
long vacations are much too long, and that a far wiser 
arrangement would be four terms in a year, correspond- 
ing to the four seasons, and separated by breathing 
spaces of perhaps a week or ten days. But whatever 
the length of the vacations they are only regions devoid 
of interest if we deliberately make them so. In reality, 
they are great opportunities, and their profitable use is 
as much a part of the educational problem as are the 
other busy months. In our customary school life, the 
unwisdom of these long idle months has come to be 
generally recognized. The gap between June and Sep- 
tember is now being filled by summer camps, by vaca- 
tion schools, by school gardens, by corn and tomato 
clubs, by Boy Scout activities, and by other wholesome 
schemes. A three-years college course offers two such 
long vacations. If a lad has come directly from the high 
school to college, and has never been in Europe, he can 
hardly do better than to spend at least one vacation 
abroad, but not, I should say, in company with another 
lad as crude and inexperienced as himself, but in the 
company of an older educated person who would make 
the trip something more than a mere idle prank. But 
if the lad has made the great world journey, or has 
already been in Europe under anything like favorable 
conditions, it would be very wise for him to devote 
both long vacations to seeing America, not the America 
of tourist hotels and summer resorts and idle cottagers, 



370 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

but that larger America of effort in which he is so soon 
to take a part. It is desirable that here, as in the world 
journey, a lad should realize the essential necessity for 
labor, and should be inspired with a genuine desire to 
do his own proper share. To make the vision of work 
a reality he would better lend a responsible hand. To 
make it educational, the work must be self-chosen, ap- 
pealing to the lad's own sense of what is interesting and 
important. For obvious reasons, it would better be out- 
door work. There is plenty of physical bigness in our 
open-air industries. The lad can choose the bigness which 
most touches his own spirit, the bigness of mountain, of 
forest, of open range, of grain-field, of illimitable sea. 
With a little well-directed search he can find a summer 
berth on some surveying party, in a mining enterprise, 
in the forestry service, on a cattle ranch, in the wheat- 
fields of the Northwest, at a summer camp, on board 
a veritable ship of service. He will have a happier 
summer, as well as a more profitable one, than if he 
had joined the manufactured occupations of leisure. In 
many cases the work will be rough, but the fault will 
be more than balanced by its robust sincerity. 

In my own four-year undergraduate college course, I 
spent two of the long vacations in private enterprises 
of travel in the Southern Appalachians, and the third, 
the most profitable one of them all, as a member of 
a railroad surveying party in western Pennsylvania. 
My own modest job was to give the " back sight " to 
the transit-man, and at each station, one hundred feet 
apart, to measure the angle of the slope, so that the 
office men could calculate the necessary " cut and fill." 
It was not at all difficult work, but it kept me out in 
the air the entire day, gave me a long enough tramp to 



AFTERWARDS 371 

bring a hearty appetite and wholesome physical fatigue, 
and left me enough leisure en route to hang around the 
transit and find out everything that was going on. Nor 
was the incidental experience less valuable, the oppor- 
tunity to study at short range the rank and file of our 
American citizenship, as it goes about its prosaic daily 
business. Such a trip involves some danger, but a boy 
must learn to meet danger and look out for himself. I 
recall a typical experience. One day we were running 
our line through a swamp between a steep wooded ridge 
and the Clarion River. I was waiting for the signal to 
give the back sight. I heard a curious rumbling noise, 
quite unlike anything I had ever heard before, and 
stepped forward to see what it was. An immense log 
shot through the air on a level with my head and only 
a few feet in front of me. It cleared the swamp, and 
landed on the bank of the river, with sufficient force 
to strip off every shred of bark. I was, in fact, standing 
at the bottom of a long timber shoot, and might ex- 
pect at any moment to be bombarded by similar cata- 
pults. After that, I learned to reconnoiter the ground 
when I took up my position in the woods. The rail- 
road company met my expenses and paid me a dollar a 
day. As this was practically the first money I had ever 
earned, I was correspondingly proud. But it seemed to 
me that I was being doubly paid, — the experience 
itself was such high pay. Even now, I recall and value 
some of the social and scientific lessons of that remote 
summer in the woods. 

Such opportunities do not ordinarily come with the 
morning mail. A boy must look them up, and persist 
until the right thing is found. But the act of deciding 
upon a summer plan, and exercising the will in carry- 



372 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

ing it out are a valuable part of the scheme. In looking 
back, a man often regrets some of the easy times in his 
life, when parents, or teachers, or friends let him off ; 
but if he has any eye for values, he never regrets a 
single hardship. 



XIV 

LIVE YOUR OWN LIFE 

The process of getting educated, if carried out with 
any degree of imagination and skill, is much too de- 
lightful a process to end with the bachelor's degree. 
Nor would it be economic. At twenty-one a young man 
has lost some of the plasticity of early youth, but if 
his twenty-one years have been well spent, he is now 
equipped with a sound, dexterous body, and with an 
intellectual tool well sharpened and ready for work. It 
would be a great individual and social loss to have him 
put this splendid tool aside, or to put it to other than 
the best uses. In any case, the essential process of educa- 
tion cannot be stopped. It goes on, willy-nilly, until 
the end of the earth-chapter, until death. The real 
problem is one of efficiency. At twenty-one a man is 
not educated, however intelligently he has been brought 
up. At best, he is only educated up to twenty-one. 
And he is not even educated up to that age, unless he 
has been taught to see that this revelation of the moral 
and aesthetic universe which constitutes education, this 
unfolding and perfecting of the human spirit, is in real- 
ity a life-long adventure upon which he is consciously 
to enter, with a stout and merry heart. If the principle 
of self -activity has been faithfully and loyally followed, 
the boy will not be appalled at the prospect of having 
to take his life in his own hands, for that is precisely 
what he has been doing all along, and doing increas- 
ingly with each passing year. Graduation, instead of 



374 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

being a hazardous plunge from the cloister into the 
world, ought in reality to be a very casual happening, 
. — the mere closing of one volume and the opening of 
a succeeding one. It is a foolish thing to have a boy 
feel at twenty-one that he is suddenly confronted with 
a new and momentous problem, — the right ordering 
of his days. If he has been living to any purpose, he 
has been doing this all along. The only novelty is that 
hereafter the bread-and-butter problem is to assume 
a more practical part of the whole problem, but even 
here the novelty is only one of application, not one of 
thought. If his education has been at all sound, it has 
been founded upon economics as well as upon religion, 
and he is familiar with the necessary role which labor 
plays in every rational scheme of life, and eager, now 
that he is equipped for the work, to render his own in- 
telligent share. 

A young person whose ideal of life is to escape 
necessary labor, and to force other persons — men or 
women or children — to do his share for him, is not an 
educated person, and is sadly in need of further disci- 
pline. The sudden intrusion of the bread-and-butter 
problem into the life of a young man, and particularly 
under our present disorderly industrial system, is to 
give the problem, in his unprepared mind, a quite mis- 
chievous emphasis. His father tells him, somewhat 
gruffly, that now he 's got to get to work. His mother, 
with more emotion, straightens out his cravat, and 
buttons up his coat, quite as if she were fastening on a 
knight's armor, and sends him out to get on in the 
world. His maiden aunt, with tears in her eyes, talks 
quite solemnly and touchingly of the fight he is about 
to put up, and how she hopes, and prays, for his sue- 



LIVE YOUR OWN LIFE 375 

cess. The fight she has in mind is our present ignoble 
scramble for wealth, and the success she impiously 
prays for is the wealth itself. And his sweetheart, if 
he have one, — practical, even in love, — urges on the 
fight by promising him herself, just as soon as he has 
won ; and by this she too often means just as soon as he 
can keep her in complete, debilitating, parasitic idleness. 
An uneducated young man — and most college grad- 
uates are still uneducated — quite naturally accepts 
this caricature of life. He sees that in our present in- 
dustrial anarchy, the average slice of the good things 
of life is a small portion. He accepts the idea presented 
by his father, his mother, his maiden aunt, his sweet- 
heart, his social class, that to make a career for him- 
self is to manage so cleverly that he shall be able to 
appropriate much more than the average slice, and so 
make himself and his relatives and his friends both 
proud and happy. Life becomes a struggle ; not a praise- 
worthy struggle with his fellows for better things all 
around, and the Great State some fine day, but a hor- 
rid, fratricidal struggle against his fellows for an un- 
just share of the good things which too often he has 
not even helped to produce. With the consent of all 
concerned, a young man is thrown headlong into this 
daily irreligion, this denial of service and brotherhood, 
and then his mother and his maiden aunt and his sweet- 
heart, now a cooler wife, audibly wonder why religion 
has lost its hold upon men. The uneducated young 
man naturally accepts the world as he finds it, and is 
ready to sell his youth, and his time, and his health, 
perhaps even his earlier scrupulousness, to the highest 
bidder, and does not know until too late what a 
wretchedly bad bargain he has made of it. In nine 



376 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

cases out of ten, he offers excuses for his disloyalty to 
himself and to society, by preaching contentment with 
a social order, a struggle of wild beasts, which no man 
of brains or conscience ought ever to be contented with. 
He does not hear, or hearing, fails to comprehend that 
saner voice, crying in our midst : " To be reconciled to 
one's lot is the worst fate that can befall mankind. The 
one real tragedy in life is the being used by personally 
minded men for purposes which you, yourself, recognize 
to be base." 

The majority of the persons in our midst are not 
educated, and so they submit to this worst fate, and 
repeat this one real tragedy. Even the minority, the few 
young persons who really are educated, the Devil fights 
for with every social and industrial allurement, and only 
a very few escape into the larger life of reason and jus- 
tice and religion. 

I now propose to consider the case of this minority 
of the minority, and to ask how a young man bent on 
illumination and righteousness shall order his days from 
twenty-one on. I shall give him for a personal motto, 
the borrowed title of this chapter, " Live your own 
Life." He has been doing this with the help of counsel ; 
he is to go on doing it, and to do it more thoroughly, 
with the help of himself and of God. 

Education, rationally conceived, is not at all the hap- 
hazard process which it is commonly thought to be, and 
commonly in practice made to be. It is the definite 
working-out of perfectly definite fundamental princi- 
ples. Life after college, from twenty-one on, is to be of 
the same definite character. It is to be an affirmation 
of the will. The will sums up what a man is, with so 
much of reason, religion, education, intuition, as he has 



LIVE YOUR OWN LIFE 377 

gathered from his contemporaries and his ancestors. In 
a young man, even of considerable education, the will, 
as a rule, is feeble and timid. It is neither affirmative, 
nor has it, as yet, much to affirm. The young man does 
by instinct many vigorous, forceful, lustful things along 
conventional lines, and they are commonly mistaken for 
manifestations of the will. In reality, they merely pub- 
lish the fact that his will is not yet developed, is not yet 
in command, and so he is the too-ready victim of cus- 
toms, and conventions, and instincts. Later, he may 
do some of these same things, after enlightenment has 
come, but it will not be from any blind necessity. He 
will do them because he elects to do them. He may act 
on occasion in conformity with instinct and convention, 
but if he does, it will be because his will, open-eyed, 
regards the given acts as profitable and desirable. The 
educated lad is forever an asker of questions, a denier 
of imposture, a seeker of truth. He will make his own 
multiform mistakes, and they will sweep over the whole 
possible range, from the comic to the tragic, but at least 
he will not be the dupe of contemporary or past mis- 
takes for the insufficient reason that multitudes of other 
men have made them. He will suffer, he will offend, but 
in his heart there will be the great peace, for he will 
be sure that he can meet no ultimate disaster. And in 
the end, he will know God. 

At twenty-one, it is the bread-and-butter problem 
with which a young American of the present day is sup- 
posed primarily to cope. The majority do, and so stren- 
uously that they have little time for other things. But 
for the minority of the minority there are, properly 
speaking, no problems. The world is, — things are. 
Life is not a problem, not even a great problem. It is 



378 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

something much more pulsating, more intuitive than 
that, — it is an experience. The main business of life is 
to be. It is to affirm, in the most grandiose manner, a 
will the most nearly divine. There are few who are 
willing to take life on such simple, magnificent terms. 
They seize upon all sorts of entanglements, past and 
present, they invent new entanglements of their own, 
and then pompously call these snares of the spirit, 
problems. When _a man straightens up, tries to look 
wise, and begins to talk to you about ordinary affairs, 
his own and others, as problems, you would much better 
slip off, for ten to one he is only going to make a noise. 
It is worth remarking that the great spiritual teachers, 
Lord Buddha and Lord Jesus, and their elect company, 
had no problems. They beckoned men away from these 
entanglements and puerilities, into the great open 
heaven of the Eternal Immediate. The main business 
of life is with this Eternal Immediate, this stream of 
time, this affirmation of the will. It is to live your own 
life, — it is to move forward freely, each in his own 
path. 

On all sides, it is true, we see multitudes of persons 
living their own lives apparently, and apparently mak- 
ing a sad mess of it, — idlers, spendthrifts, seekers after 
a thousand pleasures. But they are not discrediting the 
injunction, for in reality they are not following it. They 
are simply following the crowd and are often involving 
others to their harm. It is very clear that such an in- 
junction is only valid if it applies to all. Live your own 
Life has for its necessary corollary, Let others live 
theirs. Even in this form it is not a creed for cowards 
and lazy persons. It is a creed for men of courage and 
high spirit and the only creed which can bring abiding 



LIVE YOUR OWN LIFE 379 

satisfaction. It is not a novel creed, though it is preached 
by such extreme moderns as Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, 
Ibsen, Shaw, and in gentler form by those less tumult- 
uous spirits, Emerson and Matthew Arnold. In reality, 
it is the heart of our old Buddhist prayer, and of the 
sturdiest thought of both Greece and Alexandria. Nor 
will it seem novel or revolutionary to the boy of twenty- 
one who has been brought up all along in harmony 
with its teaching. He will really be doing a great 
thing, — to be himself, — but if his education has so 
far been a success, it will not occur to him to be any- 
thing else. It would, I confess, be a distinctly revolution- 
ary programme for the ordinary public-school boy, the 
ordinary boarding-school product, the ordinary teacher, 
the ordinary church-member, the ordinary shopkeeper, 
the ordinary professional man, for they have all been 
brought up not to be themselves, brought up to con- 
form, as far as their waywardness will permit, to a body 
of traditions, prejudices, customs, almost guaranteed to 
suppress any possible novelty. 

The difference between our educated boy and the or- 
dinary uneducated graduate will show itself from now 
on to the graveyard, but in nothing more markedly than I 
the way in which they handle the bread-and-butter ques- I 
tion. The educated boy will take it casually, as he would 
a top-coat and an umbrella on a stormy day, and with- 
out effort will treat it as a means to an end, as a nee- \ 
essary body-servant to his physical life, — admittedly 
necessary but always a servant. The ordinary boy, on 
the other hand, takes his bread-and-butter seriously, so 
seriously that when he tells you with a choke in his voice 
that he means to make a success of his life, what he 
really means is that he plans to get not only bread-and- 



380 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

butter enough, but a hundred times more than enough. 
He omits to say that in doing it he will probably, almost 
surely, make shipwreck of his real life, the life of the 
spirit. For human life is short, — if you do this, you 
cannot do that; if you devote yourself to the non- 
essentials of life, the essentials are bound to go by the 
board. 

The difference between the two types of boy may be 
summed up in a nutshell : the educated boy treats the 
essential things seriously, and the secondary things cas- 
ually, while the ordinary boy treats the essential things 
casually, and the secondary things seriously. 

Now the bread-and-butter requirements must be met 
by all of us, idealists as well as materialists, but they 
are secondary in any well-planned career, and may never 
rise above the level of means. The man whose purpose 
it is to live his own life will keep bread-and-butter in 
this secondary place. The moment he fails to do this, 
the game is up, and he has become the servant, instead 
of the master, of industry, and has gone over to the crowd 
of commonplace, unimportant folk. The educated boy 
who comes out of college with a stout and merry heart, 
or from his apprenticeship with the artists, is not op- 
pressed by any bread-and-butter " problem." He is the 
gay possessor of the day and he means to use it, not waste 
\ it. He means to go on educating himself, to go on gain- 
ing the deep satisfactions of life, to go on serving and 
being served, to go on devoting himself to the essential 
things, — and, incidentally, to pay his way. There are 
I many respectable, moral, pious persons who will shake 
J their heads at such a plan of life. Their morality is cus- 
tom, and from such a point of view, the plan is immoral ; 
but at the same time it is the beginning of a new and 



LIVE YOUR OWN LIFE 381 

higher morality, which will one day be the accepted 
custom. 

To live this free, religious life, without compromise 
and unabashed, involves no struggle on the part of per- 
sons who are moderately sane. It is too bad to speak 
of life as a struggle, and so to justify the inhumanities 
of warfare. The real struggle is to keep one's self un- 
corrupted by the worldliness of one's own family ; one's 
own sweetheart, perhaps ; of the ordinary teacher, priest, 
church-member, editor, business man, prominent citizen. 
They all have a thousand specious reasons why this beau- 
tiful boy of twenty-one should turn back from his radiant 
life, and adopt their own shabby plans, and to all these 
reasons they attach the siren name of Morality. But 
this morality which they preach, so red in the face, is 
nothing more than the excuses which they themselves 
have invented to justify their own failure to move for- 
ward. When a boy really sees this he can prick many 
a solemn bubble, and go laughing on towards the King- 
dom of God. There is one recurrent bubble which must be 
recurrently pricked. It is that unconvincing, ineffectual 
contention that certain things have got to be done. One 
hears that children must be born, that coal must be mined, 
that railways must be run, that steamship fires must be 
stoked, that certain wares must be made, that goods must 
be sold, that sky-scrapers must be built, that a thousand 
other things must be done, and that somebody has got 
to do them. This is an assumption pure and simple, un- 
founded and indefensible, and is used to bolster up the 
most scandalous schemes of life, from the fashionable 
clergyman to the commercial drummer and the prosti- 
tute. There is one unanswerable reply to all such soph- 
istry, and it is that such a necessity does not exist. It 



382 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

cannot be proven by any method, direct or indirect. 
Some of the activities declared necessary may under 
certain conditions be thought desirable, but when you 
have substituted a problematical desirability for an im- 
perative necessity, the bubble is pricked, the whole ques- 
tion is up for discussion, and is open to restatement from 
the point of view of a higher morality and a freer will. 

In the course of the many journeys to which I have 
so often referred, journeys which have carried me into 
every one of our forty-eight states, I have visited many 
out-of-the-way corners, and have frequently been obliged 
to stop at hotels which could not truthfully be called 
pleasure resorts. One of the hardships of such an ad- 
venture is the swarm of commercial travelers. If there 
is any more hopeless and complete way of wasting a hu- 
man life than to be a drummer, I have yet to discover 
it. But incredible as it may sound, each of these men 
was under the illusion that the " line of goods he carried " 
(I think I have the lingo right) had got to be sold, 
and consequently the selling took precedence over every 
other obligation and decency. One of these drummers, 
a nice, handsome lad, told me with engaging frankness 
that his line of goods — shoes, I think — could not sell 
on their merits, since they lacked such recommendation, 
and that he had, therefore, to lie about them. His 
offense in lying about his wares seemed to me trivial in 
comparison to the graver offense of lying to himself about 
his own destiny. 

There are, of coure, other pitfalls for those anxious to 
fall into them, but this very specious argument of ne- 
cessity once out of the way, it is amazing how beau- 
tifully free the field of life adventure really is. Nothing 
may claim the bo}^, no ancestral trade or occupation, no 



LIVE YOUR OWN LIFE 383 

industrial lure, no preposterous obligation. Because six 
generations of John Smiths have been ministers, or 
lawyers or doctors or barbers or pork-packers or mill- 
hands, is no possible reason why this particular John 
Smith should be one. It is a free field, — the boy him- 
self may claim anything. 

In many of the occupations, it will be necessary for 
a boy to undertake three or four years of specific prep- 
aration. This is notably the case if he goes in for one 
of the so-called learned professions, or for a modern 
scientific pursuit, such as engineering, chemistry, or agri- 
culture. In other occupations, he may learn, and per- 
haps best learn, by doing. No one can properly select 
an occupation for the boy, but any free spirit can mate- 
rially help him by pointing out the implications in each 
occupation. The occupations themselves are legion, but 
the principle of selection is exceedingly simple. The 
possible occupations, I should say, are those which have 
in them the eternal element, which possess, that is to 
say, an essential importance, and a fundamental, abid- 
ing interest. And the impossible occupations are those 
marked by essential futility, which possess neither gen- 
uine importance nor an enduring interest. This offers a 
practical touchstone which a boy may apply for himself 
in estimating the possible merits of any given occupa- 
tion. Does it deal with human needs which are funda- 
mental, or fictitious ? important, or trivial ? artistic, or 
commonplace ? wholesome or sickly ? Or a boy may 
put the case to himself in this fashion : suppose your- 
self at threescore years and ten, at the end of the jour- 
ney and looking backward, is the given occupation one 
which would seem to you, from that point of view, the 
worthy spending of a human life, your life? It is a 



384 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

penetrating question, solemn enough when asked in ad- 
vance, most solemn of all when asked in the actual 
retrospect. And it is a question which every educated 
person must meet. 

I propose to apply some such touchstone to a few 
typical occupations. And first it may be interesting to 
apply it to the so-called learned professions. May an 
earnest, high-spirited, religious boy, who proposes to 
live his own life, and to live it worthily, be a clergy- 
man, or a lawyer, or a doctor ? It is customary to as- 
sume that these are professions of unquestionable merit, 
and that the only possible barriers are on the part of 
the candidate, — a lack of ability, perhaps, or taste, or 
fitness ; and in some localities, a possible lack of open- 
ing, through over-supply. A boy who proposes to live 
his own life, and to be guided by the newer morality 
which regards each man as a responsible regent of Deity, 
and each act as a creative movement, will hardly accept 
current assumptions in such an important matter as 
this, but will want to weigh and measure each profes- 
sion separately, on its own merits, and for himself. It 
is true that if he were older and more experienced, his 
judgment might be different, but the judgment is wanted 
at the beginning, not at the end of the adventure. 

Looking at the ministry in this open-eyed, unprej- 
udiced fashion, a religious, educated boy will see at 
once that in the rigid denominations of every faith, the 
profession is clearly impossible, for it controverts the 
first essential principle of his life, the continuous search 
for the truth, the continuous effort to know God. The 
great churches in America, Catholic and Protestant 
alike, have found the truth, and the first requirement 
for entrance to their priesthoods is that a man shall 



LIVE YOUR OWN LIFE 385 

subscribe unreservedly to this truth, and shall promise 
with very solemn oaths loyally to uphold it, and to de- 
fend it against change. In my own beautiful Church, he 
must believe the Creed, formulated in 325, and the 
Thirty-nine Articles, promulgated in 1563. These are 
impressive and important documents, for they proclaim 
what some of the Church Fathers at a given date be- 
lieved ; but the attempt to impose their literal accept- 
ance upon the present hour is the impossible task of 
attempting to stop the creative onflow of time. Any 
church with a definite, specific creed is impossible to 
a modern religious boy. He cannot promise to believe 
anything, for belief is spontaneous, flexible, expansive ; 
and when he starts out to know God, he must be ready 
to travel wherever the quest leads him. The idea of a 
fixed belief belongs to the old order of things, the old 
habit of interfering with persons who are properly free, 
the old academic passion for defining things which are 
indefinable. But the old order is passing, — for the best 
spirits of the time, has already passed. It has no part 
in that newer morality which accepts genuine novelty, 
genuine creation, genuine responsibility. It is a critical 
time in the life of our Christian Church. The new in- 
sight which is now stirring the hearts of men has ap- 
peared within the Church under the name of Modern- 
ism. If the Church accepts Modernism, and becomes 
the sanctuary of those who in freedom seek God, she 
has before her a new and splendid life. If she reject 
it, she is doomed, it seems to me, to be eventually 
outgrown, just as negro slavery, and trials for witch- 
craft, and the Holy Office, have been beneficently out- 
grown. 

An educated boy of twenty-one, of average ability, 



386 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

who reads that very practical religious tract, the Gospel 
of St. Matthew, with the same care that he would be- 
stow upon any philosophical essay, will easily discover 
the antithesis between being a Christian and being a 
Churchman. In that telling allegory of the Last Judg- 
ment, where Lord Jesus states in the plainest of lan- 
guage his own idea of the way of salvation, he summons 
the naked human soul to judgment, and proposes but one 
test, the universal test of service. In the face of human 
need, — of hunger, thirst, loneliness, nakedness, sick- 
ness, imprisonment, — how did a man behave? Four 
times this homely list is repeated, and the effect is extra- 
ordinary. There is no question of metaphysical belief, not 
even, as I have already pointed out, whether you believe 
in God. But the Church makes salvation depend upon 
metaphysical belief. A boy would thus find himself in 
this very curious dilemma, that if he could, by the help 
of some intellectual sleeping-powder, accept the idea of 
a fixed belief, even then he could only become a Chris- 
tian minister by ceasing to be a Christian. A Christian 
may, of course, accept all the dogmas of his Church, — 
Roman, Anglican, or Nonconformist, — and may hold 
them to be important and helpful hypotheses of the 
spiritual life. Many of these dogmas seem to me per- 
sonally very precious. But one may hardly be a Chris- 
tian of the original type and hold any of these dogmas 
as necessary to salvation. That seems to me the real 
issue. One is called upon to choose between the Chris- 
tianity of the Founder and the Christianity of the 
Church. Is the test Service or Dogma ? But though a 
truly religious boy may not be an official, salaried priest, 
in any rigid faith, he may well be the free, unpaid min- 
ister of the new morality. Nor need he strive in the 



LIVE YOUR OWN LIFE 387 

effort. The simple integrity of a good man's life makes 
him an unconscious minister. 

In the matter of the law, there is something more to 
be said, but there are also very large and damaging 
reservations. In even so advanced a Commonwealth as 
Massachusetts, over ninety per cent of the laws, I be- 
lieve, have to do with property, and something less than 
ten percent with persons. The most respectable lawyers, 
I am told, — those who stand highest in their profession, 
and are most expectantly in line for a justiceship in 
the Supreme Court, — prefer to handle cases which in- 
volve the largest amount of property. That is to say, 
they prefer to concern themselves with the affairs of 
large corporations, receiverships, bankruptcies, will 
contests, the estates of dead accumulators. Few of these 
lawyers, I understand, care to be mixed up in criminal 
cases, or in other affairs concerning persons; few of 
them concern themselves with mere justice. In a word, 
the chief business of a modern successful lawyer is 
money. J3e_does not produce wealth ; he helps men 
appropriate it, and conserve it, and augment it. He is 
naturally best paid when the amounts at stake are 
large. At bottom, he is a commercialist, quite as much 
as if he were a stock-broker or a shopkeeper. A boy 
who proposes to live his own life, and to do it worthily, 
need not go into the merits or demerits of this partic- 
ular method of spending the days, for he will see on 
the face of it that such a method is not for him. It does 
not satisfy the conditions of a possible enlightened voca- 
tion, — it is not important, it is not fundamentally in- 
teresting, it is devoid of the eternal element. At the 
end of a life so spent there would be a feeling of empti- 
ness and chagrin. But there is another type of lawyer 



388 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

who is free from this sordid, futile use of his wits, who 
busies himself with the things that are genuinely need- 
ful and important, and whose activities commend them- 
selves to a high-minded boy. It is the lawyer who de- 
votes himself to making justice prevail, both in those 
courts where he has access and in the community where 
he lives, and who uses his splendid intellectual training 
and his large legal experience to become, in his maturity, 
an honest, disinterested statesman. A boy might look for- 
ward to such a career without any compromise of prin- 
ciple, or sacrifice of freedom. In certain offices, he would 
have to swear to support the Constitution, but even the 
Constitution is open to amendment ; and one is never 
asked to promise under very solemn oaths to believe 
always that the Constitution is right. In both these 
respects it has a decided advantage over the Creed. In 
finding the law permissible, one does not, of course, 
assert that it concerns itself with the most important 
or the most interesting or the most enduring things of 
life. The boy must decide that for himself. 

At the present moment, medicine has fallen upon 
evil days, and a boy, scrutinizing it as a possible pro- 
fession, must allow himself to be keenly critical. In all 
our large American cities the medical profession has 
been soiled and degraded by a widespread epidemic of 
acute commercialism. There are many splendid excep- 
tions, but the majority of skillful physicians and sur- 
geons seem to value their reputation for the dispropor- 
tionate fees which it makes possible. I need not quote 
examples, for no one with any large experience of mod- 
ern city life has failed to meet them pretty near at 
home. I have had a physician lie to me in order to 
bring me unnecessarily to his office a second time. I 



LIVE YOUR OWN LIFE 389 

have had one charge me the regular fee for telling me 
that he could do nothing for me and that I must con- 
sult some one else. With persons of moderate means, 
illness is coming to be dreaded, not only because of the 
suffering and inconvenience which it entails, but because 
of the devastating bill which in the end can only be 
met, perhaps, by a whole year of paralyzing scraping 
and economizing. Surgery seems particularly rapacious. 
I have known a professor's family to lose its summer 
vacation because one of the children developed appen- 
dicitis, and for that very simple operation, a removal 
of the appendix, was charged a thousand dollars. I have 
known a wholesome Harvard boy to get into the hands 
of a Boston dentist, and to be carried along, week after 
week, unnecessarily, until the bill amounted to one 
quarter of the boy's yearly income, — a double theft of 
time and money. I have not personally known of the 
cases, but I hear repeated rumors of operations per- 
formed, and visits paid, and treatments prescribed, 
which were not only unnecessary but even harmful, — 
merely for the fee. It is significant that persons requir- 
ing a somewhat complicated operation — one that need 
not be immediate — have gone to Germany to have it 
performed, because even including the crossings the 
expense was still far less. I have myself gone to an 
aurist in Vienna, — a man who stood at the head of 
his profession not only in Austria, but in all the world, 
— and for five careful and lengthy treatments paid the 
price of one indifferent treatment by a less distinguished 
man in this country. It is also to be remarked that that 
accusing document, the preface to " A Doctor's Di- 
lemma," has never been successfully answered. 

But it is not necessary to continue this ungracious 



390 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

scrutiny. The most dreadful aspect of the whole medi- 
cal abuse, however, remains to be touched upon, and 
has not, I think, been given adequate public attention. 
In the most critical cases, human lives hang in a peril- 
ous balance. A breath turns the scale either way. Now 
the power of a physician or surgeon depends not only 
upon his technical knowledge and skill, but also upon 
the insight which comes to him when he works in a 
pure intuitive spirit. To be successful, he must sense 
the case spiritually as well as diagnose it objectively. 
Commercialism robs him of this precious insight, as 
it does its votaries in all professions. At the critical 
moment his power fails and the balance tips towards 
death. The tragedy in the physician's own spiritual life 
has projected itself and become the emotional tragedy 
in the life of a whole family and a wide circle of friends. 
There are distinguished practitioners in whom this spir- 
itual blindness has progressed so far that to entrust 
a critical case to their care is practically the same as 
murder. 

A boy who elects medicine and surgery as a service 
will hardly allow himself ever to come to look upon it 
as a money-making business, but it is well for him to 
be forewarned, and well for him to understand the 
subtle currents which might, in spite of himself, drag 
him into the abyss. Physicians are not apt to be good 
business men, and they are apt to want many things 
that cost a lot of money, — a house in a fashionable 
locality, a smart motor-car, instruments and equipment 
somewhat elaborate ; and they are just as apt as other 
men to have extravagant wives and families. It often 
happens that an ambitious physician, almost before he 
knows it, becomes entangled in the net of a large expen- 



LIVE YOUR OWN LIFE 391 

diture, just as a private schoolmaster, in his desire to 
create a good school, spends more than he has. The re- 
sults for both are disastrous. The physician feels him- 
self obliged to bid for patients, to hang on to them, and 
to charge as much as the traffic will bear. The school- 
master, under financial pressure, feels himself obliged 
to bid for scholars, and in doing this, he compromises 
with the surrounding prejudice and ignorance, until 
his poor school becomes as amorphous as a jellyfish. 
The man who desires to render any genuine service 
must keep himself singularly free from entanglements. 
There is another aspect of medicine which an earnest 
boy will have to face, and that is the distressingly un- 
necessary character of much of the work. In reality the 
active physician is a modern Sisyphus, doomed to roll 
his stone up the hill one day, only to have it roll down the 
next. Most disease is preventable, possibly all of it. It 
is the plain result of unintelligent living and of delib- 
erate indulgence. I am myself a tolerably humane per- 
son, and would, as quickly as another, do my utmost 
to save a human life without first speculating upon its 
probable worth. But I could feel no enthusiasm for a 
profession in which I was asked, day after day, to res- 
cue men from the results of their self-indulgence, or 
women from the results of unwholesome, unnatural 
lives, or working-people from the results of an indus- 
trialism which kept up the supply of victims much 
faster than I could cure them. It would be better to/ 
get at the cause of things and to do my mending there. | 
But when all these necessary deductions have been 
made, there remains, of course, a large field for legiti- 
mate service in both medicine and surgery, a service 
essentially important, essentially interesting, and, if 



392 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

touched by that vision of the Greater Man and the 
newer morality, essentially worth while. The task will 
be less and less the curing of the sick, and more and 
more the furtherance of preventive medicine and hy- 
giene, and the upbuilding of a nobler race. 

A sane and intelligent boy will bring to his quest 
of a vocation nothing feverish or sacrificial. When he 
comes to compare his own aims with the current aims 
in the life about him, he cannot fail to see that what 
America now needs more than any possible technical 
skill as priest, lawyer, physician, engineer, architect, 
planter, schoolmaster, editor, or what-not, is simply 
Men, — men living lives of integrity and uncompro- 
mising loyalty to the will. Remembering that not one of 
the schemes which now belittle the day is necessary or 
compelling, a boy will feel a large freedom from the 
old false appeals, and a perfect liberty to decline not 
only those callings which are essentially frivolous, but 
those as well which offend his taste, or impair his pros- 
pect of bodily health ,and efficiency. He is much more 
wanted, this strong, beautiful, accomplished boy, than 
any of the trifles for which he can exchange his strength 
and beauty and accomplishment. He will decline all of 
the thousand and one callings which occupy the time in 
ways unworthy of a human being, and unnecessary to 
the highest social life. He will never be entrapped by 
the plea that society needs a particular service, for that 
plea has been rendered forever invalid by its unforgiv- 
able abuses, by the unspeakable crimes against the Holy 
Spirit which it has instigated, condoned, and glorified. 

As a man behind the scenes in the human drama, as 
an affirming will, as a conscious part of the cause of 
things, an educated boy is bound to realize his own im- 



LIVE YOUR OWN LIFE 393 

mense responsibility, as well as his immense freedom. 
A sluggish, unintelligent, unaffirming will may be as 
evil in its practical effect as an admittedly malevolent 
will. A social will, made up of such inert elements, may 
be itself malevolent. It may be a man's part to fight 
it, flout it, crush it. Never may society impose its own 
material standards upon an enlightened spirit. Never 
may it say to him, — we must have coal, mine it ; we 
must have railways, build them ; we must have facto- 
ries, equip them ; we must have this and that and the 
other thing, procure them ! Never may it urge one ma- 
terial product as a veritable necessity or as a veritable 
element of progress. We speak of America as a new 
country. In reality, the continuity of our republican 
form of government makes us politically one of the old- 
est nations of the Western world, older than Norway, 
Germany, France, Italy, Portugal, Russia, the Balkan 
States, — older even than England, if we place the 
overthrow of the House of Lords as the beginning of a 
new political era. We are an old nation, and during 
much of our stirring life, we have had coal and steam 
and electricity and railways, telegraphs and telephones 
and wireless, motor-cars and trolleys and subways and 
elevated roads, and all the multitudinous paraphernalia 
of material accomplishment. But these things do not 
constitute civilization ; the sociologists do not even class 
them as achievements. The truth is that civilization and 
achievement are matters of the spirit, and must express 
themselves in persons, in their spiritual and bodily and 
intellectual excellence. So far as material progress fur- 
thers this human excellence, it contributes to civiliza- 
tion, but it is not itself civilization ; and no array of 
products, tools, structures, or statistics can impose upon 



394 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

the alert will. Where these material achievements have 
been inimical to human excellence, — and this is true 
of many of them, — they are the foes of civilization and 
progress, and in that new evaluation of life which is 
now, on all sides of us, taking place, they will be re- 
jected and tossed aside. 

Many of the material achievements upon which we 
most pride ourselves are, in reality, open to serious 
question. I chance to be writing in the state of Georgia, 
and in a pamphlet in her praise I find well toward the 
front a statement that she has seven thousand miles of 
railways within her borders, — I presume that by this 
time the total is at least eight thousand ! I have used 
the railways of America more than the majority of 
private travelers, and they have made possible many 
personal explorations, but I seriously doubt whether 
America would not be a more beautiful, a more inter- 
esting, a more prosperous, and a more civilized nation 
if railways had never been invented. Civilization does 
not consist in a surfeit of things. Such a surfeit may, 
indeed, produce savagery, as you may see any day in 
any of our metropolitan cities, North or South, East or 
West. The railways have not even made us wealthy. 
They have concentrated wealth in a few hands. They 
have made possible the immense money-power which has 
become a national menace, and is now the object of a 
political attack which manifestly proposes to fight to a 
finish. Without the railways this concentration would 
not have been possible ; our forests would not have been 
despoiled ; local industries would not have been killed : 
delightful old towns would not have been ruined over- 
night, and hideous mushroom towns allowed to grow up 
in their stead ; local art and architecture would have 



LIVE YOUR OWN LIFE 395 

flourished ; families would not have been scattered ; 
quaint customs would have been preserved ; the army 
of commercial drummers, now wasting their lives in a 
dreary round of discomfort and vulgarity, would be pro- 
ductively and happily employed at home ; the hundreds 
of thousands of railway employees now rushing aim- 
lessly over the land, or stalled at junctions or on sidings, 
or lounging around freight-houses and depots ; and 
other hundreds of thousands drudging away to produce 
railway ties and steel rails and rolling stock, and engine 
fuel, might all be doing agreeable, productive things and 
living much more rational lives; the unspeakable ho- 
tels, where these commercial drummers stop, with their 
dirt and discomfort and ugliness, would never have been 
thought of. The major error lies in our worship of 
things. The real truth is that we do not need many 
things to make us happy and civilized. We need only 
a little food, moderate clothing, modest shelter, and a 
few adequate tools, but we do need [spaciousness and 
beauty and free time and friendliness" and ideas and an 
active will, and we do need to keep the multiform ele- 
ments of life in something like proportion. 

A lad who has been genuinely educated, must so order 
his days and so organize his entire life that through the 
intelligent operation of his will he may secure these 
simple, necessary, attainable things, and still live his 
own true life, and keep the control alwaj^s in his own 
hands. He may not sell his time, or hire himself out to 
any man, or allow any man to decide where he shall go 
and what he shall do and what he shall say. Such obe- 
dience is, to a free spirit, the great crime. The only 
ground for rational obedience is where the person obeyed 
assumes the consequences, and so becomes responsible 



396 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

for one's life and welfare. It is reasonable to require 
obedience from children, for we stand between them 
and human want. They would perish without us ; and 
so we assume very willingly the responsibility for their 
lives, but to carry out this responsibility we must have 
their obedience. It is a grave trust and one that we 
must relinquish line by line as we see that the children 
are capable of shouldering the responsibility for them- 
selves. But we may not go too rapidly or too far. In 
the new evaluation of life which is now taking place, 
there is much unwisdom and harmful sentimentality in 
the talk about the " emancipation " of children and 
young persons. That is the object of all education — 
genuinely to emancipate them — to bring them to the 
point where they can order their own lives and make 
them the expression of their own intelligent will ; but it 
is the height of unwisdom to declare prematurely that 
this has been accomplished. The boy or girl who comes 
home for food and clothing and shelter and social status, 
lays a heavy responsibility upon the home, and can only 
pay for it by reasonable obedience. A young man who 
is willing to live at his father's expense, but unwilling 
to respect his father's wishes, is disloyal, not to his 
father, but to a principle of life, and deserves the con- 
tempt of more robust and loyal spirits. A boy of 
twenty-one who has been educated to this more com- 
plete view, knows that when he accepts wages or salary, 
he places the responsibility for his sustenance in the 
hands of another man, and is bound in the very nature 
of things to yield obedience as the price. In all matters 
connected with the work in hand, he must go where he 
is told to go, and do what he is told to do, and say what 
he is told to say. When for any reason he feels that he 



LIVE YOUR OWN LIFE 397 

cannot with propriety obey, there is but one reasonable 
course open to him, and that is to give over both the 
work and the wages. It is transparently clear, then, that 
a boy who means to live his own life must in the end 
fend for himself. It may take time for him to get on his 
feet and to be his own master industrially as well as 
spiritually. It may take time and seeking and effort. 
He may meanwhile be obliged to sell a part of his time, 
to hire himself out to the least objectionable master that 
he can find to employ him. But the arrangement is tem- 
porary, — en route, — a thing to be regretted and never 
for one moment accepted as an ultimate plan of life. 

Mr. Samuel Gompers has recently declared in print: 
"I am a member of a family of working people; my 
father and grandfather worked at a trade. There are 
now four living generations of union members in my 
family, starting with my father, a cigarmaker eighty- 
four years old and ending with my oldest son's daughter, 
a stenographer. I worked at my trade twenty-six years, 
and the members of my family have been, are, and ex- 
pect to remain, wage-earners. We belong with the 
workers, and we want to stay where we belong." 

It is a ghastly chronicle, and affects me much as if 
a slave had rattled his chains in my ears and told me 
how he loved them ! But such frank statements as this 
of Mr. Gompers are valuable, for they show just where 
too many workingmen stand. And they throw into sharp 
contrast the unionist ideal of wanting to remain wage- 
earners, and the educational ideal of freedom and such 
hardships as freedom may bring. A boy is very badly 
educated, indeed, if he wants to remain a wage-earner 
all his life, and is little qualified to lead other workers 
into freedom. I should say that Mr. Gompers is a very 



398 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

poor guide for the hard-working and presumably hon- 
est men who make up the rank and file of his labor 
federation. When slavery was compulsory, as in the 
case of the negro before the Proclamation, the only 
way to abolish slavery was by legislative action. But 
when it is voluntary, as it is in the case of the majority 
of wage-earners, and clerks, and stenographers, and 
officials, and the people generally who sell their time 
for hire, the cure must be individual. The slavery is 
due to a state of mind (become chronic in the case of 
Mr. Gompers and his family, and threatening, from his 
own account of it, to become hereditary), and can only 
be abolished by a contrary state of mind. The war of 
liberation must be fought out in the world of ideas. 
Slavery of all sorts, industrial as well as religious, civil, 
and social, is the outcome of a slumbering will. It van- 
ishes before the alert will. And, as I have been point- 
ing out, to produce the alert will, to arouse a man to 
live his own life, is the proper and most momentous 
task of education. 

In examining the stock occupations offered by society, 
a boy who is true to his education, and unwavering in 
his determination to live his own life, will find that for 
him the greater number are impossible, because they 
are at variance with the fundamental principles of his 
life. Perhaps on the whole, this is no personal disad- 
vantage, for he will be sure of sufficient leisure, and he 
may be led by the small number of permissible callings 
to invent novel and interesting ones. As a practical 
person, he will first assure himself of food and clothing 
and shelter, and such personal equipment as may be 
essential to the carrying-out of his plans. He may do 
this by rendering a specific service for a specified price, 



LIVE YOUR OWN LIFE 399 

some service which is not base, which will not enslave 
himself or others, which will preferably occupy only a 
part of his time, and which will leave unimpaired his 
self-respect. Or he may provide himself with the neces- 
saries of life by producing or fashioning so much of 
them as he may, and exchanging the surplus for things 
which he cannot produce himself. Just what he does 
will depend upon himself, his tastes and interests and 
abilities, and upon the resources of the neighborhood. 
When an educated man once makes up his mind that 
the things he needs for his freedom are very small in 
one direction, and quite extravagant in another direc- 
tion, he is already a very rich man, provided the small 
things cost money, and the extravagant things do not ; 
and he is a very poor man, when the case is reversed. 
If the small things represent material needs, and the ex- 
travagant things, the needs of the spirit, such treasures as 
space and air and love and health and beauty and music 
and books and tramps and art and the alert, free-acting 
will, — things that cost little or no money, — then it is 
quite possible for all men to be free and independent. 

I have watched with profound interest and for many 
years the sweep of material achievement in this coun- 
try and abroad, and have shared, in part, the material- 
istic thought which accompanied it. I have always been 
painfully sensitive to the hideous industrial side of this 
development, but I believed that this complicated, intri- 
cate mechanism would somehow in the end serve per- 
sons ; and that out of chaos, God would bring order. So 
omnipotent did this material achievement finally become 
to the men of the closing years of the last century, that 
it took on a scientific validity and came to figure as 
a causative thing, — environment. Man was the child 



400 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

of this environment. He could not be saved individually, 
and apart from the environment, for it was cause, and 
he was effect. The only way to save him was the appar- 
ently evolutionary way, to perfect his environment, and 
then to wait for its assured product. We might well 
leave such a work to God, for it was miles and centuries 
beyond human power. But to all appearances, God did 
not act. The industrial environment became more dev- 
astating rather than less devastating, the human prod- 
uct less full of promise. Men appealed to Heaven and 
prayed, as men have seldom prayed before. But there 
was no answer. And some of the men said: "There is 
no God. We must take the world as we find it ; each 
for himself and the devil get the hindmost." But the 
others, though confounded, waited, and slowly in their 
hearts grew up the conviction that God had not answered 
their prayer, not because he was not, but because they 
had brought to him a task which was properly their 
own task, and that however the affairs of the Milky 
Way and the Solar System may be regulated, ,in the 
affairs of men God works through men. And with this 
came a realization that our material industrial environ- 
ment, at once colossal and hideous, is the product of 
men's own activity and can never redeem them, how- 
ever long we wait. It is man who is the active cause, 
the creator. It is man who makes the world what it is. 
There is no outer force to change his environment, and 
if there were, he would change it back, for it is the pro- 
jection of his own spiritual life, his creature, not his 
creator. He cannot be saved by outer forces, by profit- 
sharing, or trades-unionism, or paternalism, or stock- 
owning, or by any form of individual, corporate, muni- 
cipal, state, or federal legislation. This is the funda- 



LIVE YOUR OWN LIFE 401 

mental error in the materialistic conception of Socialism 
and in the too literal application of the economic inter- 
pretation of history. We may accept, with gratitude, 
the observed reactions from better surroundings, and 
must not go to the opposite extreme of denying or even 
belittling their influence ; but to make it really effective 
the desire for betterment must, on the whole, precede 
the betterment itself, and must be the initial motive 
power in the cycle of cause and effect. In a word, we 
must increasingly recognize that there are two elements 
in human environment, — one, material, economic, and 
highly important, and the other, spiritual, causative, 
and still more important. With God operating only 
through his appointed regent, man, there is no possible 
salvation for any man, except through the activity of 
his own will, — " of his own volition he proceeds unto 
heaven, unto hell." Or as Milton puts it, " The mind is 
its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, 
a hell of heaven." It is a heavy charge to work out one's 
own salvation with fear and trembling. 

A boy brought up in this school of the alert will, 
brought up to this religion of the all-conquering will, 
may not accept the world as it is, with its cheap moral- 
ity, its stock occupations, its wretched, unmanly ex- 
cuses, its fading memory of the image of God. On the 
contrary, he will stamp his own will upon the world 
with boldness and audacity, and in nothing will he be 
more uncompromising, more masterful, than in his man- 
ner of spending the days, in his occupation. For he has 
learned a great secret, one that allows no false humil- 
ity, one that any man may learn, the great transform- 
ing secret that just in the measure of his own purified, 
affirming will, he is one with God, — " gods are we, — ■ 



402 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

if we will." In this mood he will not readily hire him- 
self out, and sell his time for base or trivial or even un- 
important uses, — he will certainly not be a commercial 
drummer. Nor will he be deceived by any platitudes in 
regard to the equality of men, for he will not only view 
the life around him with wide-open eyes, and mark the 
evident inequalities, but he will also realize, as a stu- 
dent and thinker, that as men differ in the development 
and power of their wills, so they differ in quality as 
human beings, and are of the most various degrees of 
excellence. He cannot but perceive that men of the type 
of Mr. Gompers, who are not only wage-earners them- 
selves, but wish both their ancestors and descendants to 
be wage-earners, are made of very different stuff from 
his own alert, ambitious self. His judgment would be 
very confused and untrustworthy if he felt the same 
respect for a wage-earner, whether an octogenarian 
cigarmaker, or a high-salaried official of the American 
Woolen Company, that he feels for the brave men and 
women who may perhaps have smaller incomes than 
either the cigarmaker or the official, but who resolutely 
paddle their own canoe, own their own time, live their 
own lives. The people who have sold out, and have not 
even the virtue of seZ/-possession, are people of a differ- 
ent breed. They have handed over the responsibility of 
their lives, their daily sustenance, to some one else, and 
have said in effect : " Give me bread-and-butter. I am 
your man. Make out of me as much as you are able." 
It is difficult for a free spirit not to feel contempt for 
these prisoners of a small idea who lock themselves in, 
and are both prisoner and jailor. He must feel pity, but 
he cannot, with either honesty or propriety, feel esteem, 
for they are not estimable. 



LIVE YOUR OWN LIFE 403 

No one pretends that our present industrial organi- 
zation is either decent or tolerable, least of all, those of 
us who have our eye on the Great State. So acute has 
the industrial situation become, that as every American 
knows, it is the one large issue in our national politics. 
Interest in the doings at Washington has never been so 
keen within my own memory as it is to-day. It is real- 
ized that our industrial system is breaking down under 
its own weight and that some new synthesis is wanted. 
In such an emergency it is useless to say that any one 
group of men, or any one social class, is responsible 
either for the system or its break-down. We are all re- 
sponsible, every one of us, for we all consented. The 
man who exploits labor and appropriates an undue share 
of the product is only one party to the transaction, and 
vastly in the minority. The man who allows his labor- 
power to be appropriated is the other party, and is 
overwhelmingly in the majority. It is useless to ask 
which party is the more responsible, for it is the old 
triumph of intelligence over numbers. Which party shall 
change the system ? It is hardly to be expected that the 
minority will, for they organized it and profit by it. As 
for the majority, the workers, they seem in all the vital 
concerns of life to be singularly unintelligent and stu- 
pid. They hold in their own scarred, unlovely hands the 
key to the situation, for they could gradually abolish 
the present master-and-man industry by one simple act, 
— refusing: their labor. Bodies of workers do from time 
to time withdraw their labor from the market through 
the strike, but this is in no sense an attack upon the 
master-and-man system. It is an attempt, generally fu- 
tile, to gain some advantage in the game. The truth is, 
of course, that the majority of men, and especially the 



404 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

sort who go in for trades-unionism and the closed shop, 
have no desire to abolish the wage system, for they have 
no stomach to meet the responsibility of the personal 
life. The men who mean to live their own life do not 
go in for this sort of thing, and care little to win empty 
and temporary advantages. Their purpose is nothing 
less than the overthrow of the whole master-and-man 
system and the substitution of a cooperative, or even 
individual, industry which shall leave each man his self- 
respect and independence. The better minds in this 
man-movement realize that the really effective propa- 
ganda is education, and instead of employing the tac- 
tics of trades-unionism and attacking the system by 
hopeless objective methods, they are increasingly rely- 
ing upon the far more subtle and effectual method of 
attacking the system subjectively, in the minds of the 
workers. The habit of dealing with numbers tends to 
make one ignore the individual, and this educational 
propaganda has not been free from such a mistake. It 
is sound in carrying the struggle into the true arena 
where it must be fought out, into the arena of ideas, of 
the spirit, but it has too much depended upon some 
remote associated action, in which apparently each man 
waits for his neighbor. In reality, the time is now, and 
the people who are to save the world are already here. 
They are not Mr. Gompers's sort, but they are the new 
type of man, educated in the school of the alert will, 
proposing to live their own lives, ready to assume the 
responsibility of such personal life, and ready to help 
others without interfering with any one. Their labor- 
power is not open to appropriation, or any bad bargain, 
for the simple reason that it is not for sale. 

It is my own belief that when this movement spreads, 



LIVE YOUR OWN LIFE 405 

and it seems from its own inherent reasonableness 
bound to spread, many of the outward features of what 
we proudly call our present material civilization will 
sharply be called in question, and failing to justify 
themselves on human grounds will be swept away as 
completely as feudalism and slavery have been swept 
away. When we soberly take up our task as God's re- 
gents, and scrutinize what we do, and how we spend 
our days, and what sort of regents we personally are, 
we shall make the easy discovery that for much of our 
so-called progress we are paying far too dear a price, 
and that from many of the accepted activities of the 
day it would be much more civilized to refrain alto- 
gether. 

Long before our coal deposits have been exhausted, 
and the last ton of iron ore brought up from the mines, 
I find it possible to imagine that the railways of Amer- 
ica may have been voluntarily relinquished by an edu- 
cated people no longer willing to pay the price of their 
construction and maintenance and use. I can imagine 
the typical American of a more enlightened day say- 
ing to our much-vaunted product and agent of civiliza- 
tion : " No, I have done with you ! You imposed upon 
my ancestors. You gathered a frightful toll of injury 
and death. You cost them an untold number of mis- 
spent, grimy, exhausting days. You scarred and pol- 
luted their earth. You offended their eyes and their 
ears and their nostrils. You brought into existence a 
race of intolerable taskmasters. You posed as the high- 
priest of civilization, and all the while you were spawn- 
ing a race of barbarians to construct you and feed you 
and operate you and wait on you ; all the while you 
were carrying a mob of commercialists on unworthy 



406 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

errands; all the while you were robbing the country- 
side of her forests, and flooding her with cheap and 
nasty goods. Hereafter I shall be free. I prefer home- 
grown food, and home-made clothing, and home-built 
shelter, with individuality to boot; and when I go 
afield, for pleasure and instruction, it shall be afoot 
or on my own steed ; over the hill, instead of under it ; 
in the daytime, seeing, instead of at night, ignoring." 

And I can imagine that we shall forego many other 
things, not because the raw material has given out, or 
the art of manufacture has been lost, but because a 
more intelligent and more religious scrutiny of life will 
show that instead of furthering civilization, they hinder 
and destroy it. It is a serious, exacting business to be 
God's regent on the earth, but not until we take up our 
high office, and scrutinize the day's work from the 
point of view of persons, will the Kingdom come. With 
this deeper purpose in mind, the selection of an occupa- 
tion becomes a religious act, and the manner in which 
we habitually spend our days, the practical test of our 
righteousness. But along with the immense responsibil- 
ity, it is a point of view which brings a sense of exhila- 
rating, boundless freedom. To get rid, first of all, of 
that stupid incubus which would fasten itself upon 
every young life, the thought that one must settle down 
and go in for some money-making business quite the 
first possible moment, and to substitute for it the saner 
thought that one must never settle down, and must 
never esteem money-making as more than a casual and 
part-time necessity, is in itself a tremendous boon. To 
elevate each day into a genuine holiday, and to calcu- 
late, not how much money one can make, but rather 
how little will be needed, — this is the proper attitude 



LIVE YOUR OWN LIFE 407 

of educated persons. I may with song in my heart and 
laughter on my lips occupy myself for a reasonable 
part of each day, or a seasonal part of each year, with 
quite humble concerns, provided they are needful and 
important. Right merrily I may devote myself to any 
productive toil which gives us tasteful food, and becom- 
ing dress and suitable shelter; to any constructive tasks 
which have an undoubted social utility ; to the spiritual 
activity which gives us literature and education ; to the 
research work of a useful science; to the art impulse 
which creates music and painting and sculpture and 
architecture. But why should I, the regent of God, 
desecrate the holy days by doing useless, meaningless, 
trivial, competitive things, or worse still, the things that 
bring evil and degradation ? Why should I spend all 
my time and thought and energy upon the means to 
life and have nothing left for life itself? 

A boy brought up to know the real values is not a 
boy to accept any poor substitute for life. He has had 
life abundantly up to twenty-one, and after twenty-one 
he asks it more abundantly, — not of God, who in giv- 
ing the possibility has already done his share ; not of 
society, which can only give what he communicates to 
it ; but asks it of that giver of many good things, him- 
self. He has lived, up to twenty-one, in the present mo- 
ment; after twenty-one, he asks an immediacy no less 
real. So much of happy, self-chosen work, so much of 
pleasure, so much of growth, so much of love, so much 
of service, so much of friendly comraclery, so much of 
food and delicious open air and clean water and manly 
exercise, so much of beauty and emotion and fresh ex- 
perience, so much of gracious rest and slumber and the 
renewing of life, so much as the day will hold, —so 



408 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

much he wants! And he wants these vital things so 
much more than low wages or high salaries, that unlike 
Mr. Gompers and the official of the American Woolen 
Company, he elects the more important things. The in- 
dividual advantage of living your own life is so tran- 
scendent that the plan once apprehended, no other plan 
is possible. And the social merit of the plan is equally 
great. It is only in this way that society grows better, 
not by the marching out of companies and regiments 
into the new life to the music of some party formula, 
but this silent, continuous coming out of the individual 
spirit, out of slavery into freedom. 

The widespread belief that a man must stay behind 
in order to help the rest out, that self-sacrifice, in a 
word, is nobler than self-realization, is founded upon 
the fundamental error of supposing that one man can 
save another. Even were this true, which it is not, the 
method would have the grave defect that a man who 
had never saved himself could hardly save any one else, 
for he would be a blind leader of the blind. But no 
man can save another, — there is no possible atone- 
ment. Salvation is an inner process, a regeneration of 
the individual will, a personal coming to know God. 
It is a solemn, private act which may not be delegated 
to any friend, however devoted, or however illustrious. 
In awful solitude, each man must save himself. But 
the spectacle of a saved man is always salutary. A man 
living his own life honestly and unaffectedly, affirming 
his own will bravely and consistently, might indeed pass 
through life wholly unconscious of any personal min- 
istry, and yet be one of the major forces for righteous- 
ness in his day and generation. The word duty has 
been so constantly misused that it is almost coming to 



LIVE YOUR OWN LIFE 409 

stand for the thing that we ought not to do. Commonly 
it means some form of interference, some attempt to 
come between a man and the natural results of his con- 
duct, some scheme for substituting our will for his 
will. To live your own life is only universally possible, 
if you let others live theirs. 

AYe are supposed to be a practical people. In so 
often devoting ourselves to material trifles and neglect- 
ing the human essentials, we hardly deserve the reputa- 
tion. But it is a good ideal. To be practical is half of 
genuine morality. To have a worthy purpose is the first 
half, — to attain it is the other half. It is fitting to point 
out that fidelity to the highest ideal of occupation is 
quite sure to bring success. The majority of our cur- 
rent schemes bring disaster. But the man who has dared 
to live his own life has been educating himself all along, 
by the most approved methods, and cannot fail of vic- 
tory. By declining all tasks into which he could not 
put his whole soul, which he could not stamp with his 
whole will, he has proven himself the inevitable master 
in such tasks as he has chosen. He may have flouted 
the world in professing a braver creed than its own, 
but genuine mastery carries everything before it. And 
meanwhile he has had the immense, unparalleled de- 
light of being himself, of doing things that were inter- 
esting and worth while, and he has been spared the 
unspeakable ennui of meaningless, shriveling tasks 
which would have carried a small soul on towards the 
vanishing point. A boy who starts out at twenty-one to 
lead his own life, really starts out to continue his edu- 
cation through the whole of life, and so enters upon a 
path of high and stirring adventure. 

If such a boy marries, he has added an important 



410 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

element to the possibilities of his life, but he has not 
necessarily made it or marred it. One must accept with 
immense reservation the easily-made statement that a 
woman has made a good wife to a man (I doubt if any 
outsider can say), and with equal reservation the charge 
that she has failed. In our modern conception of mar- 
riage, which means enlarged freedom for both men and 
women, it is less momentous in determining power than 
it was in the past. The man or woman who goes down 
under the test of marriage, has succumbed, not so much 
to it, as to his own imperfect hold upon the eternal 
verities, and would doubtless have tripped, if not over 
this, then over some other apparent obstacle. I used to 
think that a man who married was rather a brave fel- 
low to hazard so much, and the woman indubitably rash 
to hazard so much more. But I no longer pull a long 
face at a wedding, nor am I unduly touched by the seem- 
ing loss of two personalities in the dubious make-up of 
a third, for I know now that even more fundamental 
than this apparently most intimate of all relations is 
the relation of a man to his own soul, and the relation 
of a woman to her own soul. To ignore this is to invite 
disaster. The attempt to make too much of a relation 
is a pretty certain way to make too little of it. A man 
or woman may easily miss the happiness which he 
expected to find in married life, and that is a tragedy 
not to be lightly spoken of ; but it is no excuse for per- 
sonal failure. The religion of the alert will fails indeed 
to offer justification for any personal failure, either in 
marriage or in any other delicate and difficult business. 
It is the proper function of the will to dominate the 
personal life, in spite of grief or pain or outward disas- 
ter, and to come off victorious against any and all odds. 



LIVE YOUR OWN LIFE 411 

Those who know life know that the will is capable of 
doing this. Those who are ignorant of the secret look 
on in wonder, and believe that they are witnessing the 
impossible. 

This brings us to the final paradox in this world of 
the will. And the paradox is this, that while it seems 
to require unusual daring, uncommon audacity, and an 
attitude almost nervously heroic to live your own life 
as a resolute, unflinching affirmation of the will, in real- 
ity it is the easiest and simplest thing that a man can 
possibly do. And the reason is very clear. A man has 
only to be himself, to obey the inner voice, and he can 
suffer no defeat. A man living his own life with reli- 
gious single-mindedness seems to the onlooker who is 
ignorant of his secret, to be in constant conflict with 
the institutions of society, with its conventions, usages, 
traditions, and in equal conflict with a large majority 
of the men and women with whom he rubs elbows dur- 
ing the course of the day's work, and whose several 
schemes of life he roughly challenges by his own radi- 
cally different life. He seems to live in an uproar of 
accusing and threatening voices. In a measure this is 
all true. But the conflict and the turmoil are not in his 
own soul. They may rage around him to the point of 
crucifixion, but they leave untouched and serene the 
inner heart of him, the calm, affirming will which he 
himself is forever chastening and disciplining, and so 
bringing into semblance of a really divine will. It is an 
inner peace, clear and intelligible to its possessor, be- 
cause it is the result of an assured inner harmony, but 
passing all understanding on the part of those who see 
its operation, but do not know its source. This immense 
assurance, this amazing audacity are not poses, as an 



412 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

uninformed world is prone to misthink them, but a 
logical and necessary outcome of that view of life which 
is the spiritual heart of education. In the absence of 
even the possibility of disaster, it is incredible that one 
should be timid, or otherwise than serene. 

That a youth committed to so simple and obvious a 
plan as merely living his own life, unfolding his own 
spirit throughout the whole course of the earthly jour- 
ney, should seem to his fellows strange, incomprehensi- 
ble, lawless, only shows how deep the iron has entered 
into their own souls, and how unfaithful we parents and 
teachers have been in avoiding the deeper issues of edu- 
cation, and letting our energies play about the curricu- 
lum surface. This attitude of the affirming will is not 
a philosophic fiction ; this inner peace which passeth all 
understanding is not a poetic figure. They are realities 
well attested in the lives of the men and women who 
have stirred and controlled mankind. Call up the great 
affirmers of the world, from Assyria to Lord Jesus, from 
Lord Jesus to America, and you have the effective men 
of history. 

In starting a boy out on such a masterful career, it 
would be unfortunate to allow him to believe that this 
mere act of choice makes him a superior person, for in 
reality all he has done is to enroll himself on the per- 
manently winning side, and that might be a mere act 
of prudence. But a boy educated in this school of 
thought will hardly trouble himself with any such 
schemes of personal classification, or with any petty 
question of praise or dispraise, or claims, or approval 
or disapproval, for the drama upon which he has entered 
is far too positive and absorbing to allow this waste of 
time. What seemed to be a colossal egotism might as 



LIVE YOUR OWN LIFE 413 

well be called a profound humility, for in reality it is as 
far from one as from the other. It would be difficult to 
say which is the more unsuitable, self -laudation or self- 
depreciation. A properly educated lad will not deal in 
either, for they are equally meaningless before that great 
overshadowing fact with which he is ever engaged, — 
the present creative moment. Our own human part is 
small enough when you think of the total Will, which 
is God. But this part is never unimportant. It is large 
in point of significance, for in the measure that we are 
faithful in living our own life, in affirming our own will, 
so is God more positive, more benevolent, more all- 
powerful. It is as the conscious, active regent of God 
that an educated boy finds his true metier, and takes 
his proper part in the life of his time, — not in pride, 
not in humility, but in a spirit of definite, purposeful 
participation. 

Men are separated by their vices but united by their 
virtues. In attempting to live the selfish life a man 
pursues ends antagonistic to other men's ends. But as 
he grows just and virtuous, he desires what they also 
desire, and grows more catholic and more impersonal. 
The barriers between small souls are large, between 
large souls, small. It is the test of the good man that 
he shall be in nothing exclusive, but in all things the 
sharer of a large and more universal life. In making 
life an intentional affirmation of the will it is hardly pos- 
sible to go on affirming small, unimportant, personal 
things. The will asks a larger plan, a greater task, and 
day after day is less concerned with what is generally 
understood as a man's private fortunes. The will grows 
indifferent to this personal side of life, not because it is 
a losing game, — which, of course, it is, — but because 



414 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

there is a bigger, more interesting, more wonderful and 
more enduring game which comes finally to fill the whole 
space of a man's attention. To ask nothing, and to have 
everything, — to die, and to be born again, — to lose 
one's life in order to find it, — this, I take it, is the open 
secret of the universe, so transparent to those who can 
see, such a foolish riddle to those who cannot. It is the 
key to all the notable lives which have stirred and be- 
wildered the world from the time of Gautama, Buddha, 
and Confucius down to our own day, this marvelous ac- 
cession of personality which means in the end a high 
impersonality. 

It is instructive to recall the language of those great 
souls who have left any verbal record. They have not 
belittled themselves, — to the uncomprehending they 
have sometimes seemed arrogant. They have affirmed 
their own enlightenment. They have called themselves 
the Son of God. They have known the worth of their 
great message. They have spoken as one with au- 
thority. But they have never regarded themselves as 
unique, or exceptional, or inimitable. On the contrary 
they have always promised their disciples the power for 
greater works and urged upon them the duty of higher 
attainment. One might almost say that this constitutes 
the difference between the true and the false prophet, a 
readily applied test, whether he asserts the universality 
of his power, or whether he claims for himself unique 
and peculiar power. But in this, as in so many other 
matters, the great teachers have not been heeded. The 
denial of unique claims has been taken as a supreme 
condescension, the studied untruth of a god who would 
thus lessen the infinite distance between himself and his 
creatures. But the gods are not humble, and the gods 



LIVE YOUR OWN LIFE 415 

who are gods are not dealers in falsehood. They are to 
be taken literally at their word. 

To live your own life is an immense, absorbing task, 
whether you are old or young, clever or stupid. It is 
the most amusing, most interesting, most profitable 
thing in all the world, and also the most useful. It re- 
quires but one thing, and that is the will to do it. You 
may have only one talent, and a beggarly one at that, 
but it will grow with the using. You may see only a 
short distance ahead, but that is all you need to see. To 
live your own life, even when you have the will to do it, 
requires, however, a large spirit, a large indifference to 
approval and disapproval, above all, that rarest of hu- 
man qualities, a flawless sincerity, a keeping faith with 
one's own self. For a poseur does not live his own life. 
He tries to live the life that rightly or wrongly he 
fancies some one else would be impressed with in case 
he did live it. And he fails as often in his guess as 
in his execution. The conformist does not live his own 
life. He is much in the same case as the poseur, except 
that he more than half believes in his own pose, and as- 
cribes his doubt to the evil whisperings of the enemy of 
souls. He might conform, through mere lack of intelli- 
gence, accepting the most threadbare ideal of his own 
poor little community as his own ideal, and letting life 
go at that. But a genuinely intelligent man, sincerely 
seeking the truth, must often find the old morality in- 
adequate and unsatisfying. This is true in all the rela- 
tions of his life : in the family, with its adult servitudes 
and juvenile disloyalties ; in the school, with its insist- 
ence upon intellectualities and ignoring of intuitions ; 
in the church, with its fixed creed and remote brother- 
hood ; in the state, with its pressure of privilege and 



y 



416 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

taxation. He comes to see that morality, when it grows 
too old, is merely a cloak for bad conduct, an elaborate 
system of excuses invented by indolent, cowardly, self- 
indulgent people to justify their own failure to move 
forward into the unfolding righteousness. To live his 
own life truly, the moral man must break with the old 
morality as Jesus broke with it, and must be the setter 
up of new ideals. In fact there are few persons out of 
our hundred million who do live their own lives, — they 
are all tied down by some local consideration, some 
petty, vicious expectation on the part of some one or 
some group, and lack the simple courage to assert the 
superior propriety and claim of their own will. Some- 
times it is a husband who tyrannizes over his wife, — 
sometimes a wife over her husband. Sometimes it is 
a parent who tyrannizes over a child, — sometimes a 
child over a parent. Sometimes it is a brother over 
a sister, or a sister over a brother, a friend over a friend, 
a neighbor over a neighbor, an employer over his serv- 
ant. Sometimes it is one man over a group ; more fre- 
quently a group over one man. It would be safe to say 
that it is a rare Christian minister who succeeds in living 
his own life. His official creed, his bishop, if he have 
one, the church council, the newspaper press, his con- 
gregation and vestry, the terrible old lady who has been 
there longer than he has, his fresh young curate, even 
the choir boys and acolytes, all have their eye on him, 
and out of this curious conflict of expectations he ex- 
tracts a composite which becomes the real law of his 
daily procedure. And it is much the same with other 
professional people, with schoolmasters, lawyers, phy- 
sicians, and the rest. It is obvious that the people who 
sell their time, the wage-earners, can make no pretense 



LIVE YOUR OWN LIFE 417 

of living their own lives. Certainly Mr. Gompers neither 
lives his own life nor aspires to. Judging from his illu- 
minating magazine article, he is kept busy living up to 
his ideal of the virtuous working-man who knows his 
place, and is anxious to remain where he belongs. 

In general, there seems to be a social conspiracy to 
keep people from living their own lives, and this quite 
regardless of whether these lives are better or worse 
than the substitute lives which society prescribes ; and 
wholly oblivious of the claims of sincerity. Persons who 
do not ask for freedom for themselves are hardly 
prompted to allow it to others. This unwillingness to 
move in a large, tolerant, truth-seeking world is the 
mark of the provincial mind, and is the antithesis of 
education. 

There is nothing quite so spiritually stifling as the air 
of a typical, highly respectable, American village. The 
" categorical imperative " is a body of customs long 
since discredited, where each man knows what his neigh- 
bor ought to do, and proposes to hold him up to it ; and 
not knowing what he ought to do himself, tries awk- 
wardly to do what is expected of him. People fly from 
such a close atmosphere to the larger cities, not because 
they like the narrow quarters and high prices, but be- 
cause they like the greater freedom. They turn away 
to the allurement of the frontier, not because they like 
the hardships and are indifferent to the old friendships, 
but because the simple chance to be themselves in an 
attitude of broad and friendly tolerance is more to them 
than bodily comfort and old associations. In any new 
country, and notably in our own Far West, you will 
find alert, bright-eyed people, women as well as men, 
living lives of almost privation, and yet enthusiastic 



418 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

over it, and the secret is that they have come into a 
world of larger and freer ideas. Sometimes circum- 
stances bring them back to the old home, but they are 
never again the same, and when they speak of the late 
excursion afield they speak of it in spiritual terms, as 
an experience, as an education. 

No life-plan is complete unless it inculcate a sound 
attitude towards death. In the five-fold cycle of organic 
life this is the last and inevitable term. All living 
things not only die, but they must die. We see death 
on all sides of us, — plants, animals, persons, friends, 
relatives. We grow accustomed to it, sadly and unwill- 
ingly. We know that it is inevitable, and yet we hardly 
grow reconciled to it. As for ourselves, we know that 
we, too, must die, but I believe that we never fully ac- 
cept the thought. It cannot be said that any man really 
expects to escape the common fate, but neither does he 
quite expect to die. We have at the present moment 
about a hundred million persons in the United States. 
Each year, between two and three million of our coun- 
trymen die. How shall we regard their death, — how 
contemplate our own? Shall we regard death as a dis- 
aster, or shall we say with St. Francis, " Blessed be our 
sister, the death of the body, from whom no man escap- 
eth." It is not to be expected that we shall all look at 
death alike, for our attitude will depend upon our tem- 
perament, upon the circumstances of our personal life, 
upon our religious belief. But education must deal with 
so universal an experience and must at least offer some 
way of handling the matter in our thought. I do not 
know the proportion of sudden deaths, but even those 
who die suddenly themselves have had to meet death 
consciously when it came to others. The great majority, 



LIVE YOUR OWN LIFE 419 

I presume, are appraised of their own approaching 
death. They hear the summons some time before the 
death angel actually stands at their side. It would seem 
to me unintelligent, as well as unfortunate, that a de- 
parting spirit should not be prepared to meet this cul- 
minating experience of his life with dignity and high 
suitableness. If the spirit persists and is to pass on to 
another life, as I myself firmly believe that it has at 
least the option of doing, it would seem to me that it 
could to far greater advantage enter upon this new stage 
of existence, if in quitting the old life, the dominating 
will might make one final affirmation of its essential 
desires and dreams. If a man has been true to himself, 
and has lived his own life, his final character expresses 
what he is, with so much of his hopes and desires as he 
has become conscious of. I conceive that in dying he 
takes this with him, and that it becomes the impulse of 
his new life. But it is possible to think that at this 
supreme moment he has it within his power to dismiss 
the outgrown ambitions of the earth-life, and in the 
clarity of death to reaffirm the things that are excel- 
lent and enduring. Education must deal with birth 
and nutrition and growth and reproduction and death. 
With the most august of these, with death, we would 
wish education to deal the most convincingly and 
nobly. A man has not learned to live until he has 
learned to put aside forever all fear of death, until he 
has learned to suffer the encroachments of death in the 
circle of his chosen ones, until he has schooled himself, 
when the hour strikes, to meet death triumphantly 
himself. We parents and teachers who know so well 
what a void death makes, as it carries off one by one the 
brightest ornaments of our day and generation, who 



420 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

school ourselves on beds of sickness and in the presence 
of danger and advancing years to look death unflinch- 
ingly in the face, have hardly done our duty to youth if 
we fail to instill in them a similar fortitude, a similar 
calm, and such measure of hope as it is in their hearts 
to entertain. We teach them many smaller lessons. 
The great lesson is this, — to live bravely, to die hope- 
fully ; in life a triumphant, affirming will, in death a 
will no less affirming and triumphant. 



XV 

THE QUESTION 

In the preceding chapters, education has been pre- 
sented as a process which covers the whole of life, from 
the moment of birth to the moment of death. Adequately 
conceived, the process goes even further, — it touches 
upon the pre-natal life of the child, and concerns itself 
with the future destiny of the departing spirit. The 
earth-life of a man may be compared to the glories of 
the visible spectrum. It begins in the long slower pulse 
of the red rays. It mounts in intensity as a man lives 
the full, rich life of a man. It passes into the unknown 
beyond the short, quick pulse beat of the ultra-violet. 
We see what we see, but on both sides of our seeing there 
lie regions of life just as real as those portions of the 
spectrum which lie beyond the power of our vision, 
the heat rays which go before the red, the chemical rays 
which follow close upon the violet. In the realm of sci- 
ence it is the unseen, intangible, inferential forces which 
play the major role ; in the realm of the spirit we stand 
face to face with equally authentic verities. We may not 
see, we may not hear, we may not touch, but none the 
less surely, we become aware. 

The tasks of education are concrete and specific. 
They have to do with the practical spending of the days. 
But it has been impossible to consider these tasks in any 
practical and helpful way without constantly referring 
to the underlying theory, to that genuine and inmost 
philosophy which really represents our attitude towards 



422 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

life. Sometimes this reference has been explicit, some- 
times indirect, but always it has been necessary. For 
education ever presents itself as a double question, — 
What do you want to do ? How are you going to do it ? 
And not only does the Hoio depend upon the What, the 
means upon the end, but both, in the last analysis, de- 
pend upon a complex of considerations drawn from the 
whole realm of human knowledge and human faith. In 
reality, the educational process is a synthesis. It sums 
up in action the result of our complete contemporary 
thought. 

Kant stated the human problem in his three well- 
known questions : — 

What can I know ? 
f What should I do? 

What may I hope ? 

Human life is essentially a question, an inquiry. The 
very form of the problem makes it so clear that no final 
solution can ever be reached. No man answers the ques- 
tion with any degree of finality, even for himself. Still 
less can he answer it for others, or for that different 
man which next year, next month, to-morrow, he him- 
self becomes. We are infinitely fortunate in many and 
varied directions, but in nothing more fortunate than in 
this, that we never catch sight of any ultimate goal. We 
all have our moments of illusion. We catch sight of 
something which seems to us final and ultimate. We 
approach it, perhaps by rare good fortune even grasp 
it, but only to find that it is a milestone, something en 
route, and that the true goal lies beyond, over the lumi- 
nous horizon in that future which we move towards and 
never reach. 

There are times and seasons when a weary soul asks 



THE QUESTION 423 

for rest, asks for something static and enduring. Its 
conception of the Great Peace is not as a Great Assur- 
ance, a tranquillity of spirit in the eternal movement, 
but as a Great Inaction. Our dynamic view of life 
seems to it intolerable, as infinitely fatiguing. Better 
the fixed tableau, even the drop-curtain of death itself 
than this ceaseless, eternal pageant. In such a mood, the 
milestone is mistaken for the goal. In such a mood, 
dogma becomes final, law crystallizes into a code, re- 
ligion into a creed, social conduct into convention, edu- 
cation into a curriculum. There are few souls, however 
radiant, who do not at some time fall into this dogmatic 
slumber, this snare of the static. We are dazzled by 
the possession of what seems to us Very Truth, and 
for the moment we forget the living present with its 
immense claims, its divine happiness, its magnificent 
onrush, and prostrate ourselves before some motionless 
image of the past. And there are multitudes of souls 
who never rouse themselves. They rest for a moment 
in the static, they find it comfortable, and in the end, 
they doze off into futility. It is a profound tragedy, for 
unless some spiritual reveille sounds in those sleeping 
ears, they are as good as lost, for such slumber ends in 
death. 

Education is a living process, outgrowing every form, 
and momentarily creating new forms. It is evolution, 
unconscious for the most part, semi-conscious when made 
formal. It ceases when it ceases to move on, for Life 
flows on eternally, and education, to serve Life, must 
keep abreast of Life. 

In the foregoing chapters I have tried to suggest this 
essential and unescapable fluidity. But in dealing with 
concrete and specific things it grows fatally easy to lose 



424 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

sight of the inherent movement and to speak and to act 
as if we were face to face with a rigid, changeless uni- 
verse. We are surrounded by crystallizations, by state, 
school, church, family, art, science, philosophy, language, 
concepts, text-books. We know, of course, in a vague 
historic way that all forms are temporary, that new 
forms are forever arriving. But it is the existing form 
which most impresses us, not the form which was, about 
which at best we have only partial knowledge, nor the 
form to be, about which we have no positive knowledge 
whatever, or only a very faint and wavering intimation. 

Many agencies conspire to produce and to preserve 
this rigid view of things, to keep us in the static world 
of slumber and to hold us back from the dynamic world 
of life. They are immensely respectable agencies, and 
easily impose their point of view upon a soul just be- 
ginning to ask the meaning of life. I may only consider 
three or four of these obstructionist agencies, and 1 
must do it much more briefly than their influence and 
importance merit. 

In the first place, it is well known that nearly all 
persons easily grow fatigued. This is especially true if 
one is not strong or if one is no longer young. It is there- 
fore natural and I suppose inevitable that the majority 
of persons should be conservatives. They allow them- 
selves to fancy that life moves too rapidly for them, re- 
quires too long-sustained effort, and that the better 
policy is to drop out of line altogether and so retard by 
sheer weight of numbers the disquieting and tumultuous 
onflow of life. The chosen business of the conservatives 
is to preserve old forms and to resist all change. They 
have behind them tremendous vested interests, — spirit- 
ual, linguistic, material. They are much esteemed, and 



THE QUESTION 425 

are flatteringly called the balance wheel of society. They 
imagine themselves to be the maintainers of order and 
the preventers of chaos. In the main they are friendly, 
picturesque persons, and they entertain unquestionably 
high motives. 

The conservative thesis does not sound unreasonable. 
It is, first, that the gains of the past must at all hazards 
be conserved ; and secondly, that since all change is not 
improvement, novelties are not to be countenanced until 
they have justified themselves. But it is not a thesis 
that works out well in practice. Strictly speaking there 
are no permanent gains in the past to be conserved. 
There were immense gains, but they were en route. The 
past was just as fluid as the present. The gains ever 
assumed new forms and are for the most part repre- 
sented in the content of the present. The largest in- 
gredient in our own moment of time is memory, not 
only human memory but that cosmic memory stored up 
in the qualities of animal and plant and stone. To hark 
back to the wisdom of the fathers is commonly a useless 
effort, since so much of their wisdom as was genuinely 
permanent is involved in our own present ; and it is often 
a mischievous effort, since it ignores the intervening 
wisdom. The only complete and inclusive record of the 
past that we possess is the present moment, a record 
not only complete at any given instant, but automatically 
revising and completing itself at every instant. And 
then, in the second place, it must be remembered that 
a failure to accept and try out the novel content of the 
arriving m©ment is to make impossible any practical 
evaluation of its worth. How are we to know whether 
the novelty is wisdom or foolishness, if, on its arrival, 
we immediately shake our heads and turn it down? 



426 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

Fortunately there are nearly always souls in residence 
courageous enough to look the matter in the face, and 
report upon its quality. The new thing is tried out in 
life, and its value published to a world less brave. But 
often the individual cost of the knowledge is unforgiv- 
ably large. The conservative thesis really presupposes 
a vicious constitution of society. It divides the world 
into sheep and goats. The sheep are those who do not 
experiment, who content themselves with the past, and 
who resist as far as possible every recognizable change. 
The goats, on the other hand, investigate the arriving 
dangers, determine experimentally their quality, and 
for their service are placed outside the pale. The con- 
servative millennium will arrive, of course, when all are 
sheep, and none are goats. But such a consummation 
would mean the cessation of all progress, and so in the 
end the decay and death of society itself. It is not neces- 
sary to choose between conservatism and disorder. The 
real choice is between conservatism and the open, con- 
temporary mind. 

The next obstructionist agency is curious, far-reach- 
ing, and frightfully fertile in bad results. It is the un- 
avoidable rigidity of language and its equally unavoidable 
ambiguity. In earlier chapters I have been insisting 
upon the choice of the right word as an essential part 
of the most elementary education in English. This as- 
sumes apparently that the right word exists and that 
such a choice is possible. In reality, the assumption is 
far from warranted. The disturbing truth is that lan- 
guage, at its best, is a mere approximation ; and at its 
worst, is an effective device for concealing thought. 
Some years ago, many of us (myself included), fell un- 
der the spell of Max Muller's hypnotizing formula: 



THE QUESTION 427 

" No thought without language ; no language without 
thought." It is easy to see into what a rigid, categorical 
universe such a formula at once plunged us, and how 
hopeless it made any attempt to deal with the changing 
dynamic world of actual experience. It now seems in- 
credible, but we really believed that the whole thought 
process was carried out in terms of definite, communica- 
ble language, and that every rhetorical combination of 
words had some definite thought corresponding to it. 
Many unreflective persons, it is to be feared, still hold 
by this formula. But in spite of a certain convenience, 
nothing could well be further from the truth. The 
formula is refuted by every experience that is not ab- 
solutely elementary. The attempt to be articulate and 
to communicate thought is beset by two inherent and 
unescapable difficulties. Every thinker knows only too 
well that the chosen word does not accurately represent 
his thought, that it leaves out whole aureoles of subtle 
meaning and imparts unintended shades and implica- 
tions. In spite of his most painstaking effort to modify 
and qualify a ready-made word, in spite of his tiresome 
statement of the special sense in which the term is used, 
when all is done and said, the poor little vehicle will 
not carry the cargo he intended. And he also knows 
that when at last the word and its heavy trappings reach 
another mind, they will call up different memories, arouse 
unlike images, and in the end create perhaps a distinct 
thought, but almost certainly not Ms thought. The 
thought has suffered two unavoidable transformations 
en route, — the first, when the thinker tried to put his 
thought into language; the second, when the hearer 
attempted to translate the language back again into a 
thought. 



428 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

So notorious is this difficulty of communication 
through language that every careful student when he 
comes to write a treatise on any topic involving exact 
and positive thought feels himself obliged to set out 
with a most accurate definition of terms, — sometimes 
elucidating his thought and sometimes still further ob- 
scuring it. And we are all familiar with that common 
and often justifiable defense of a writer or speaker, 
when attacked, that his language has been misunder- 
stood. And we are equally familiar with that rather 
cheap form of criticism which consists in asserting that 
tfye opposite side has been guilty of an evident misuse 
of terms. 

The inherent difficulty is that there is no fixed court 
of appeal. The attempt to hark back to etymology is 
so little profitable that it is more apt than not to land 
one in fresh difficulties. Few words retain their strict 
etymological sense, and this is especially true of literary 
words, that is to say, of our oldest and most used words. 
And then, as Tyler suggests : " Our understanding of the 
meaning of a word is not always assisted by the knowl- 
edge that at some previous date it meant something dif- 
ferent." Even technical terms coined within the past 
few years from very definite roots have so radically 
changed their meaning that the average layman now 
handles the terms familiarly and quite to the manner 
born without at all realizing that he is merely making 
a noise ; that the reality conjured up in his own mind 
by the given term has long since disappeared from our 
contemporary intellectual stage and been superseded by 
a distinctly different image. The term itself remains 
outwardly the same, — the thing for which it stands 
changes. The symbol and the reality, in the mind of 



THE QUESTION 429 

most persons, get very far apart. In science, an older 
generation talks for the most part about things that no 
longer exist. To remain contemporary one must keep 
reminding one's self that over appreciable periods lan- 
guage necessarily retains a definite, rigid form, while 
the meaning is all the while fluid and variable. And 
this is true in every department of thought. In theology 
one has only to call up the term " God" or "predestina- 
tion"; in art, the term "impressionist"; in politics, the 
term " democrat " or " republican " ; in philosophy, the 
term " evolution " or " idealism "; in economics, the term 
"socialism" or " single-tax." But it is unnecessary to mul- 
tiply examples. The wonder is that with language so 
essentially approximate and uncertain we succeed in 
communicating one to another even the little that we 
do communicate. And then, as if the difficulties already 
enumerated were not quite enough, we have the further 
and unescapable difficulty that even at a given moment 
and for the most scholarly person, the meaning of any 
chosen word is not definite and strictly ascertainable, 
but is dependent upon that very fluid and uncertain 
thing, — good usage. 

As a matter of fact Max Midler's formula would be 
nearer the truth if it were almost or wholly reversed. 
Thought goes on without language. It is an experience 
of the whole self. The attempt to communicate thought 
through language involves the mutilation arising from 
a very incomplete parallelism, the delay of arranging 
serially what takes place simultaneously, the violence of 
compressing into definite, rigid form what is inherently 
fluid, and incapable of arrest. If we have any lingering 
doubt upon this point we have only to observe quite 
young children. Many of them, and very bright ones 



430 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

at that, do not talk until they are two years old. For 
many years their vocabulary is extremely limited ; for 
many years they understand only a small fraction of 
the torrent of talk which goes on around them. But it 
would be contrary to fact to maintain that these little 
people do not, the while, carry on a very active thought 
life. It shows itself in their faces, in their emotional 
states, in their actions, in the unmistakable inferences 
which these actions indicate. The test of thought is not 
communicability through language. The spoken word 
represents only a small part of it, and does it partially 
and inaccurately. And what shall we say of deaf and 
dumb children ? Their intelligence, for obvious reasons, 
lags behind that of normal children of the same age, 
but is far from being a negligible quantity. And what, 
still more, shall we say of those profound and stirring 
thoughts which find expression in poetical sound, in 
music, in painting, in sculpture, in architecture, in act- 
ing, in all art in fact, but which quite defy communica- 
tion through the medium of the spoken word ? What 
is it that makes literary translation a more or less ad- 
mirable substitute but never a reproduction ? 

Fundamentally we think in order to act, not in order 
to speak. We may regard language as a priceless con- 
venience, as a social instrument of high and unique 
value, but we may not regard it as coincident with 
thought, still less as having equal dimensions with 
thought. 

I am dwelling at such length upon the approximate 
and limited function of language, and upon its static 
disabilities in dealing with anything so essentially fluid 
as thought because these approximations and partialities 
and rigidities exercise a quite unwarranted tyranny over 



THE QUESTION 431 

our conception of the intellectual life. They enter, too, 
as a crippling element, into all educational schemes 
which are wholly or preponderatingly literary. The 
mother tongue is the most important study in the for- 
mal curriculum of both high school and college, but it 
should always include an ample criticism of its own 
limitations, and should always be coupled with adequate 
attempts to involve the whole consciousness. 

Two other obstructionist agencies which hinder our 
perception of the universe as a living, immediate expe- 
rience, and turn it into a static concept, a world of im- 
mobilities and congelations and repetitions, are largely 
involved in what has already been said, but they deserve 
separate and distinct mention, for they belong so essen- 
tially to the machinery of enlightenment that one would 
not readily suspect them of any sinister office. I refer 
to science and art. Of the two, science is perhaps the 
greater offender both because it touches our lives at a 
larger number of points and because in order to accom- 
plish its purpose and reduce the universe to an orderly, 
coherent system, it must resort to vivisection, and pre- 
sent us with a series of symbols, cross-sections, static 
images, instead of the experienced fluid reality. I use 
the term science to cover all attempts to gain exact, posi- 
tive knowledge in any department of inquiry. This dis- 
service of science was neither intended nor necessary, 
but it was almost inevitable until corrected by a specially 
directed reflection. Science has much to say about 
change and movement ; and in the doctrine of evolution 
it seemed to many early enthusiasts to have said the last 
word. But in reality, science deals in fixed and static 
conceptions. It shows us the universe at any given mo- 
ment, expresses its content in an orderly, illuminating 



432 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

way, but never presents any genuine evolution, any real 
becoming. It even fails to announce such a dynamic, 
creative process, for it assumes, with the earlier idealists, 
that all is given, that the germs of everything that shall 
be, now are. In a word, it offers no place for genuine 
novelty. It brings all its harvests to us in ready-made 
concepts. The major office of scientific knowledge, as 
we have seen, is to explain the unknown in terms of the 
known, a process which evidently has no meaning unless 
we assume that known and unknown are the same in 
kind and readily commensurable. Any unique element 
in the arriving moment, any genuine creation, quite 
eludes such an analysis and escapes unnoticed. Scientific 
knowledge, under the rules which it lays down for itself, 
consists of a series of world-views of the highest utility 
and value, without which we would be intellectually 
bankrupt ; but it never presents the world-panorama it- 
self in all its movement, variety, and novelty, for such a 
panorama can never be reduced to symbols and repre- 
sentations, — it can only be experienced. In science we 
know about things, — in consciousness we know the 
things themselves. The tendency of scientific study is to 
take our attention away from life, and to focus it upon 
some chosen and detached aspect of life. We take up 
our position and see all that we can see ; we shift our 
position and see still more ; we pass, as it were, all around 
the object, and are rewarded by a wealth of useful in- 
formation. But we remain always on the outside. When 
through a vivid spiritual sympathy we enter into an 
object, identify ourselves with it, possess it as a part of 
our own consciousness, our knowledge ceases to be sym- 
bolic and representative, ceases in a way to be communi- 
cable, and becomes immediate, absolute, personal. After- 



THE QUESTION 433 

wards we can speak o£ it, but we can never reproduce the 
reality itself in all its infinite richness and disinterested- 
ness, can never reduce it to formal scientific statement. 

We could not carry on successfully the mixed drama 
of our daily practical life without both this absolute, in- 
tuitional knowledge, and this relative, scientific knowl- 
edge, and it is therefore to a certain extent quite futile to 
ask which is the more valuable. It would be unfortunate 
to exaggerate the value of either to the disparagement 
of the other. At the present moment, however, our world 
of culture is prone to overvalue science, and to under- 
value that complete consciousness which is life itself. 
My own conviction grows (and I shall return to the 
matter later) that just now we much need to restore the 
lost equilibrium, and that in the education of children, 
particularly up to fourteen years, we want to throw by 
far the greater emphasis upon the intimate, intuitional 
knowledge which springs from direct, first-hand experi- 
ence, that is to say from living ; and to leave the sym- 
bolic, representative knowledge which results from sci- 
entific analysis until the children reach the high school 
and the college. 

The distinction between these two forms of knowledge 
is important in itself, and is so fundamental to all 
that has gone before in the earlier chapters that a simple 
and obvious illustration may be helpful. If, for example, 
you had a riding horse, would you prefer to know him 
the way an Arab horseman knows his animal, or the 
way a veterinary surgeon would know your animal in 
case you found yourself obliged to consult him ? The 
first knows his horse ; the second knows about horses. The 
first, through sympathy, has made his horse a part of 
his own consciousness, knows him intimately, absolutely, 



434 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

knows his attitude, preferences, qualities, the amount of 
food and drink he needs, the amount of rest, just how 
much he can stand, the measure of his fidelity and de- 
votion. He knows the horse with a completeness that he 
could not put into words, or measure in conventional 
standards. The bond between them is more than utili- 
tarian. It is the bond of a mutual understanding. The 
veterinary, on the other hand, does not know your horse, 
and does not aspire to. What he knows is a represent- 
ative horse, a type, quite devoid of individual quality. 
He is able to handle your horse, to treat him, perhaps 
to cure him, just in the measure that the animal corre- 
sponds to the symbol or type which the veterinary has 
in his own mind, and to which, in point of fact, he is 
really addressing himself. I am not disparaging either 
knowledge. They have been well characterized by saying 
that one is disinterested, and the other utilitarian. But 
it seems to me overwhelmingly clear that for the pur- 
poses of daily life, and for the purposes of formal knowl- 
edge later, the intimate, intuitional experience is the 
fundamental thing and should be both varied and abun- 
dant before we turn to analysis ; otherwise the analysis 
fails of material, and is singularly arid and unfruitful. 
It is easy to see that in turning to analysis, to com- 
parison, to explaining the unknown in terms of the 
known, science is forced, by the necessity of its own 
aims and method, to deal with rigidities, with static 
images, with cross-sections of life, with symbols, and to 
limit its domain to the dimensions of another rigidity, 
the mathematics of measurement. In the laboratory, as 
we have seen, science as a process of investigation re- 
duces to a measurement. And it is equally easy to see 
that preoccupation with scientific studies would make 



THE QUESTION 435 

one forget that in spite of the high utility of such sci- 
entific analysis and system, the world that we actually 
live in is to the last degree fluid, dynamic, real. The 
test of science, as Comte pointed out, is the power of 
prediction. In ruling out the genuinely novel, the im- 
measurable and the unpredictable, science has added to 
its own power of service, to its utility, but it has for- 
sworn the larger and more complete content of life. In 
valuing the utility, we must not forget its limitation, its 
essential symbolism. 

It is also worth remarking that while scientific 
knowledge stands in marked contrast to our complete 
consciousness in being coherent and articulate, it is only 
superior to the complete consciousness in matters of 
measurement because it is able to express its quantita- 
tive results in communicable units. In the absolute 
system of measurement, the centimeter-gram-second 
system, science has a yardstick of immense and univer- 
sal utility. In the life of the spirit we have no counter- 
part. But we have something much more profound than 
even the c. g. s. system, something which touches daily 
human life at an infinitely greater number of points 
and with an intimacy unknown to anything in objec- 
tive science, and that is the quantitative sense by means 
of which the developed spirit evaluates all aspects of 
life from the most obvious to the most subtle. It is only 
through the cooperation of this spiritual quantitative 
sense that science accomplishes the major part of its 
own measurements. In the c. g. s. system, for exam- 
ple, we neither have nor can have any units of either 
surface or volume. We have only the one linear unit, 
the centimeter. By squaring and cubing we gain our 
derived units of surface and volume, but their validity 



436 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

depends solely upon our inner sense of space. We can- 
not deal with them by any direct, objective method. 
The sense of space, of time, of mass, is the fundamental 
thing. It is what we want to cultivate in children, and 
make very real and deep before we trouble them with 
scientific data and systems. I venture to think that it is 
this inner quantitative sense, this spiritual apprehension 
which makes men great mathematicians and scientists, 
and not the discipline of class-room and laboratory. 
These have their subsequent value, but they are admin- 
istered to many students without, it must be con- 
fessed, any visible results. 

It may seem strange to name art as an obstruction 
to our requisite dynamic view of the world. Artistic 
perception is in fact our most perfect type of intuition. 
It is immediate, disinterested, absolute. The artist, to 
be an artist, must through spiritual sympathy enter 
into the very heart of his subject, must identify himself 
with it, and possess himself of its inmost secret. Sci- 
entific study, by reason of its analytical habit, is consid- 
ered inimical to art. The mere desire to know about 
things, to analyze, compare, measure, carries one at once 
outside the thing itself into an objective world where 
many things are possible, but not art. And yet art itself 
is an obstacle to the fluid play of the complete conscious- 
ness. I do not refer to the creative artist himself, 
for he is the most alive and contemporary of all the 
men we meet. I refer to artistic contemplation and crit- 
icism. The best appreciation of art is undoubtedly in- 
tuitive and absolute, — the beholder enters into the 
thing created and attains an inner, veritable identifica- 
tion. But this is not the experience of the majority. 
They look at the thing from the outside, and even so 



THE QUESTION 437 

fluid a creation as literature and music takes on the 
rigidity of a limited movement within prescribed forms. 
To most persons, architecture, sculpture, and painting 
represent an arrested moment, a static achievement, 
and they judge of its worth by objective analysis and 
comparison. Instead of getting at the value of the 
achievement by participation, they go about it, as any 
scientist would, by ignoring the unique element and 
measuring what is left, the unknown in terms of the 
known. Hence the first question of the typical critic is 
not whether a thing is intrinsically beautiful and ex- 
cellent, but the old static question as to whether it 
conforms to our accepted canons of taste. When these 
outer standards entirely dominate, an art work, to be 
excellent, must of course be " classical," and no novelty 
is permissible. The application of stereotyped standards, 
that is to say, of prescribed forms, prevails even in the 
most dynamic arts, — literature, acting, and music. 

The history of art progress is a history of the most 
violent and extreme quarrels. The advent of each new 
form has been the occasion of personal abuse and pro- 
tracted opposition, sometimes of actual martyrdom. It 
would be neither profitable nor pleasant to repeat the 
unseemly terms of reproach which have been hurled at 
the experimenters in the art world. Movement has been 
made unreasonably difficult. Emphasis has everywhere 
been placed upon a static conception of beauty. Each 
step in advance has had literally to fight its way. It is 
the conservative spirit, resisting change, and finding 
the reality of life not in onrushing resistless movement, 
but in an effortless rest. One may offer no excuse for 
the personal abuse and for the blind unreason that went 
along with it. But it is probably true that this stubborn 



438 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

holding fast to what is good has had a certain steady- 
ing and salutary influence in keeping us from the 
bizarre and capricious and in helping us to develop a 
wholesome aesthetic tradition. One feels this especially 
in the Far East where all the arts, except the art of 
movement, music, have attained such a high degree of 
excellence. But it is apt to be accompanied by general 
stagnation in the practical affairs of life. However this 
may be, the effect of this worship of established art 
forms upon half thoughtful and even some thoughtful 
persons has been to encourage a static rather than a 
dynamic view of life, and to reflect itself in education 
in the advocacy of repetition rather than of first-hand 
experience. 

Somewhat the same thing may be said of the chosen 
subjects of art. From its very nature, it has been thought 
that architecture may not even suggest movement. It 
must rather suggest the successful arrest of all move- 
ment, — its fundamental virtue is stability. It has been 
called (very inaptly, I think) " frozen music." But 
these ideas result from a confusion of functions. A ship 
is a fairly rigid structure, but we have small regard for 
it unless it suggest speed. We do not want a building 
either to threaten to fall apart or to move away, but we 
do want it to breathe the vitality of its proper occu- 
pancy. The most stable structure on earth, a Greek 
temple, would leave us quite cold and unregardful if it 
did not conjure up the image of a crowd of eager wor- 
shipers. To many, a Gothic cathedral brings up a simi- 
lar image, and its upward-pointing spires suggest the 
turning of one's thoughts heavenward. We like the idea 
of a fixed hearthstone, but no dwelling-house is a suc- 
cess from any point of view unless it suggest at every 



THE QUESTION 439 

turn its vital human office. The door must be wide and 
high for the free coming and going of its occupants ; 
the windows must be ample for the entrance of light 
and sunshine and air ; the roof must promise protection 
and the shedding of many storms ; the chimney-stacks 
must grow with the latitude, suggesting warmth and 
good cheer. This is not fanciful. Our buildings them- 
selves must be stable and immobile, but we miss the 
whole point in architectural design if they fail to express 
the vital movement of daily life. 

Sculpture and painting may suggest or even indicate 
movement, and some of our masterpieces maintain the 
illusion over incredibly long periods of scrutiny ; but as 
a rule, the impression is momentary, and the final feel- 
ing is one of repose and inaction. Even a lively mood, 
too long persisted in, ceases to be laughter and becomes 
a fixed and meaningless grin. There are few more de- 
pressing things than pictured hilarity. The very charm 
of the mood depends upon its transitoriness. It is bet- 
ter art to suggest a crisis than to present it. But it is a 
deficient imagination which allows the fixed moment in 
art to stand for a reality in life. 

In their subject, matter both literature and music not 
only permit movement, but commonly require it. It is 
true that some of our nature poetry depends for its 
effect upon the impression of an essential repose and 
immobility, and that some of our music, notably certain 
pieces by McDowell and Grieg, leave a similar static 
sense. But in the main, both literature and music are 
full of a necessary life and movement. The fact that this 
movement takes place within prescribed and recurrent 
forms is not, however, without its limiting effect, and 
tends unavoidably to produce the illusion of rest. 



440 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

There is a high suitableness in the suggestion that 
architecture, with its essential stability and undisturbed 
repose, should be the art form in the cult of God, the 
Father ; that painting, with its one moment of profound 
passion, should be the art form in the cult of the Son ; 
and finally that music, with its sweeping rhythm and 
vital movement and progressive development, should be 
the art form in the newer cult of the quickening Spirit. 

In saying that language and science and art have this 
tendency to withdraw the attention from the complex 
movement which is reality, and to concentrate it upon 
specific aspects and static images, one does not even 
imply that this withdrawal is necessarily a disadvantage 
or that the matter could have been handled otherwise. 
Some such withdrawal and some such concentration 
were necessary in order that we might have our present 
intellectual culture. But it must not blind us to that 
fact of transcendent importance that this analysis into 
fixed concepts and prescribed forms is not the whole of 
life ; that it is something carved out of life ; that instead 
of determining life, it is itself determined by life ; is, 
in fact, our contemporary comment upon life, and is only 
valid as it corrects and revises itself by a constant turn- 
ing back to the source. 

I have, then, built up the educational system out- 
lined in the preceding chapters upon this fundamental 
idea that Education should concern itself with the larger 
thing, Reality, and should not limit itself to the smaller 
thing, Representation. And by Reality is meant the 
whole of consciousness, both spirit and body, the whole 
of our daily human experience, the whole immediate, 
intimate, palpitating content of the moment. This is, I 
suppose, what the majority of idealists and mystics 



THE QUESTION 441 

mean by reality. When questioned they are very apt to 
say that they mean " the whole content of the present 
moment." I differ from them, and from my own earlier 
idealism, not in the statement of reality but in two im- 
portant implications which I associate with the state- 
ment. Both are negative in form. The first implication 
is that this view of reality does not require that we 
posit, with Kant, a Thui(/-i?i-itself which is the real real- 
ity under all appearances and which we can never hope 
to know ; or with Spencer, an Unknowable which con- 
stitutes the backbone of all things and is properly de- 
scribed by its name. These fictitious and unknowable 
realities of the two philosophers and their respective 
schools seem to have been made necessary by their 
attempts to explain knowledge. Our intellectual knowl- 
edge, being admittedly partial, representative, symbolic, 
seems to require back of it a more solid reality, even 
if we are obliged to make it out of whole cloth and 
christen it with elusive names. But this necessity dis- 
appears the moment we realize that back of the relative 
knowledge which the intellect carves out of our whole 
consciousness through the medium of language, there lies 
the absolute, complete knowledge of that consciousness 
itself. In a word, we do not have to posit reality since 
we have it already in our own consciousness, in the spirit. 
In such a world things are what they seem. I have spoken 
of this view as idealistic, even mystical. It would be as 
well described as spiritual realism. And the second im- 
plication is that while the present moment — that real- 
ity with which education properly deals — contains the 
whole of the past, or so much of it as is important and 
significant, it cannot by any jugglery of language be said 
to contain the future. " The gates of the future stand 



442 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

wide open." All is not given, not even, we believe, in 
the mind of God himself. Nowhere in the wide empy- 
rean do the past, the present, and the future coalesce. 
Nowhere is the world record already written, not even 
potentially in the germs of the present. To speak of the 
future as wrapped up in the present seems to us a mis- 
chievous metaphor, an affair of phrases rather than of 
realities. On the contrary we believe that the arriving 
moment brings its own independent content, to be com- 
pounded with that synthesis of the past which consti- 
tutes the present, and that this arriving moment has in 
it therefore the possibility of genuine novelty. Life, ac- 
cording to this view, is not the unwinding of a ball of 
thread already wound up by the gods. It is a movement 
which is itself creative, a passing on to a goal which is 
both indeterminate and unforeseeable. To live is to cre- 
ate, and in this creation the pattern is not set. Such a 
view seems at first sight to do violence to the principle 
of cause and effect, and so to represent an intellectual 
retrogression rather than an advance. To the scientific 
mind causation is the touchstone of validity and of race 
progress. Spencer would measure the development of a 
people by their hold upon this principle. It is possible 
so to define causation that we believers in what has been 
called a Progressive Absolute really do violence to cau- 
sation. In that case we should do it willingly because 
we should regard the definition as gravely at fault. If 
by causation one means an inscrutable, incomprehensi- 
ble First Cause set in motion in a past infinitely remote 
and operating automatically and mechanically through 
the intervening ages on into the present, and still good 
eternally for the ever arriving future, then the explana- 
tion seems to us to explain nothing and to leave us just 



( 



THE QUESTION 443 

where we were before. Our own idea of causation is 
inscrutable enough, but it is at least made comprehen- 
sible by bringing the creative cause from the infinitely 
remote past into the present moment and by making it 
continuous as well as contemporary. In allowing for 
genuine novelty one does not introduce caprice. The 
old proven order remains; the old proven laws still 
hold. The arriving moment does not bring contradic- 
tion, — it brings added wealth and new possibilities. In 
a word we remain causationists, but we introduce the 
conception of a contemporary and continuous causation. 
We sum this up by saying that existence is itself creation. 

Such a view of life makes it much more of an ad- 
venture than the average man in the street is disposed 
to think it. And it makes life not only big with possi- 
bility but intensely, dramatically real. If such a view is 
held genuinely and sincerely it adds immeasurably to 
the interest of life, makes it an enterprise of supreme 
worth, and is reflected in one's mode of spending the 
days, in one's idea of a career, in the final choice of 
one's vocation. 

I am here trying to say clearly things that are in- 
herently difficult to say. But they seem to me of the 
first importance, and to deserve on the part of both the 
reader and myself the utmost effort to gain clarity in 
comprehension and in statement. 

This Reality, this entire consciousness, which includes 
everything, the inarticulate as well as the articulate, the 
unexpressed as well as the expressed, the incommunicable 
as well as the communicable, this whole content of the 
present moment, is the proper subject-matter of educa- 
tion. And this all-inclusive reality is Life, — not the life 
of the body alone, not the activity of the mind alone, 



444 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

but primarily that permeating, pulsating life which is 
the cause and sustainer of both, the life of the Spirit. 
It is the high office of education to increase the dimen- 
sions of Reality, the dimensions of Life, to give it greater 
height and depth and breadth. We best accomplish this 
function by regarding our children (by regarding our- 
selves indeed) not in terms of the old human trinity as 
body and mind and spirit, not assuredly in the terms 
of materialism, as body only, but in the distinct and 
definite terms of that newer dualism which posits Spirit 
as the essential, vital, causative element, and Body as 
the obedient tool and servant. We conceive of spirit as 
the inclusive term, the ego, the whole consciousness, the 
immortal person. And we conceive of mind or intel- 
lect as one aspect of spirit, not the whole but a part, as 
the counters by means of which our social life is largely 
carried on, by means of which spirit communicates in 
definite terms with spirit. It is a priceless organ in both 
giving and receiving. 

In the educational system here presented we do not 
in any way belittle intellectuality, or lose sight of the 
immensely important part which language plays in 
carrying on the activities of the intellectual and social 
life. On the contrary it is the ultimate purpose of such 
an education to increase immeasurably the dimensions 
of this intellectuality and to heighten both the vitality 
and the validity of language. This can best be accom- 
plished, it is believed, by slighting for the moment, — 
up to fourteen years at least, — the claims of the intel- 
lectual life, with its symbols and representations and 
static images, its endless analyses and unavoidable rigid- 
ities, and by devoting ourselves single-heartedly to the 
source of all things, to the unfolding life of the spirit. This 



THE QUESTION . 445 

must be abundant and genuine and vital if the subse- 
quent intellectual life is to be sound. For observe that 
there is a vast difference between being bulky and being 
sound. The present intellectual life of the most ad- 
vanced races is undeniably bulky, but a keener criticism 
of its quality discloses the fact that much of it is not 
sound. 

In the study of language we are often guilty of the 
unreasonableness of introducing grammar prematurely, 
and asking the children to study the office and relation 
of words years before they have acquired a sufficient 
stock of words to supply the needed and adequate ma- 
terial for such an analysis. It is, in effect, a cruelty. 
We set the children a difficult task before we supply 
the material. We ask them to make bricks without 
straw. Later, in the high school, boys and girls of fifteen 
and sixteen years of age can master grammar in a month 
or two, provided they are traveled persons in the rich 
kingdom of words. In fact they will have discovered 
the major part of grammar for themselves. There are 
only nine parts of speech, or eight if you count the 
articles in with the adjectives, and a bright boy or gir.l 
who first knows the words themselves will make quick 
work of their function and classification. Now it seems 
to me much the same in acquiring all formal knowledge. 
The volume of life must be large before it is education- 
ally wise or helpful to set about analyzing it. The chil- 
dren must know life before they can profitably know about 
life. They must experience the thing at first hand, un- 
disturbed and unworried, and must not be troubled to 
express it, to find symbols and images for it, to analyze 
it before the hour strikes, — they must not even be 
asked to remember it. Let them express what happens, 



446 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

or keep silent ; let them remember, or apparently forget, 
— this is not the important thing. The important thing 
is that the drama shall really happen, that the children 
shall be identified with it, that the inner life shall be 
abundant and vital and spontaneous. 

Formal knowledge should never be forced upon a 
child. He has his own way of learning things and his 
own time. The method may seem less admirable than 
ours, but it is pretty sure to be more effective. It is safe 
to say that in even an average child there comes, sooner 
or later, a genuine intellectual hunger, a desire to read, 
to write, to know, to compare. It is futile to assume this 
hunger before it really exists. It is irrational to set 
about analyzing things which have not yet entered into 
the child-world, and brutal to punish children for not 
seeing things that are still, for them, out of sight. We 
may stimulate the appetite for knowledge by a thou- 
sand legitimate beguilements, we may bring the child 
into touch with a rich phenomenal world, but when we 
have done all this, we must be patient and must wait, 
as God waits, for the unescapable reaction. 

This does not mean, of course, that during the earlier 
years of life, those wonderful years of grace, we are not 
efficiently training the children along possible and rea- 
sonable lines. On the contrary, as I have tried to show 
in many chapters and by a wealth of homely detail, 
there is so much work to be done that just as a practical 
matter our limited time does not allow us to concern 
ourselves at any length with purely intellectual inter- 
ests. But in reality we are not neglecting these inter- 
ests. We are furthering them by the most effective 
means at our command. In training the Spirit we en- 
large the whole consciousness, and so increase the future 



THE QUESTION 447 

possibilities of the intellectual life. In training the Body, 
we enlarge the whole stock of perceptions as well as 
deepen the power of useful and artistic performance. 
We supply the Spirit with an adequate tool. Both as 
the purveyor of information and the agent of its pur- 
poses, Body deserves the utmost development and dis- 
cipline that we can possibly bring to bear upon it. To 
be rich in Spirit and developed in Body is the real 
measure of childish good fortune. With this as cause, 
intellectual power must in due season follow as effect. 

The grave objection to the current and premature 
intellectuality in children is not only that the final har- 
vest is so lean (we have few educated persons in our 
midst) but still more that it leads unavoidably to re- 
sults which are themselves intellectually unsound. I say 
" unavoidably " with full interns*:. WHw^alysis out- 
runs experience, as it does in this sort of education, and 
symbols and representations are fed to the children not 
only prematurely but under such pressure that all ex- 
cept the most robust must hold their noses and swallow 
them, we gain for our pains a generation of young per- 
sons trained in phrase-making and other insincerities, 
and doomed for the rest of their days to essential in- 
significance. Better those " powerful, uneducated per- 
sons," of whom Whitman sings so appreciatively. The 
majority of us are phrase-makers, if not on all sides of 
our nature, which would be complete perdition, at least 
on some sides of it, which is partial perdition. To know 
a whole lot of things which are not so is surely tragic 
enough, but to be dealing, in addition, with symbols and 
representations and images quite empty of any content 
whatever, is desolation itself. 

Our people of culture are very generally the victims 



) 



448 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

of a false intellectuality. We possess a wealth of sym- 
bols. But these symbols so far outrun the spirit-life 
which they were originally intended to express and rep- 
resent that we move, as a result, in a world of unreality 
L and inherent falsehood. It is a distinct limitation to have 
thoughts in excess of our symbols, but it is a veritable 
tragedy to have symbols in excess of our thoughts. In 
all our older and better-educated communities we have 
many men and some women who can speak with a cer- 
tain admirable fluency upon almost any topic proposed 
to them, who can occupy an hour, or more, if they are 
permitted, and yet say practically nothing. The type is 
now so common that it is coming to be rated at its true 
worth. All prudent chairmen have protective measures 
within easy reach. But our disapproval must not blind us 
to the fact jjhxk this., empty symbolism is a matter of 
degree only and that all of us are more or less guilty of 
precisely the same offense. 

On no other ground than some such confusion as this, 
is it possible to understand the current willingness to 
divorce education and religion and so invite the insincer- 
ity and discord of attempting at the same moment to hold 
two separate and often antagonistic attitudes towards 
life. If religion means in the most intimate and pro- 
found sense a man's inmost attitude towards life, it is 
the dominant note in his whole personality. If it fail to 
express itself in his intellectual life and in his life of 
action, there is a disastrous lack of correspondence, and 
the life itself is doomed to insincerity and futility. It 
is impossible to divorce education from religion, and to 
keep education a true representative of Reality, of the 
life of the Spirit. So divorced, education becomes a bit 
of empty symbolism. 



THE QUESTION 449 

And it is equally impossible to divorce education 
from economics. If we regard the body as the tool and 
servant of the spirit, as its appointed agent in our three- 
dimensional world of action, we are bound to concern 
ourselves most vitally with the welfare of the body, not 
alone abstractly with questions of general health and 
specific organic education but even more fundamentally 
with the basal question of ways and means. There must 
be food and shelter and clothing, equipment and oppor- 
tunity before the most carefully devised scheme of train- 
ing can become operative. If education neglects the 
economic basis of our daily life it fails to be complete 
and it fails to be inclusive. In effect, it concerns itself 
only with the children of the fortunate. It is a vain 
beating of the air to say that education is meant for 
everybody unless everybody has first of all the neces- 
saries of life, and is consequently in a condition to 
profit by education. 

In speaking of the analysis of human existence into 
Spirit and Body, I have allowed myself to use the term 
" dualism." I have done this deliberately in order more 
sharply to distinguish this view from the trinitarian 
conception, on the one hand, which regarded man as a 
synthesis of body, mind, and soul, and the materialistic 
monism, on the other hand, which finds no analysis 
possible since there is but the one experienced element, 
body. But I have not intended by " dualism " to suggest 
any antagonism between body and spirit, or to indicate 
any chasm between life and death. I would on the con- 
trary advance a spiritual monism which sees in spirit 
the real vehicle of life, and in body merely the beauti- 
ful and accomplished accessory. Education requires that 
both shall be at their best, but it ill performs its 



450 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

office if at any season it fails to keep body subservient 
to spirit. For body dies, even in the earth-life, dies 
ahead of spirit ; and spirit, we believe, is immortal, as 
well as causative. Both the immediate and the final 
victory are with spirit. 

In youth and health, when all goes well, when body 
and spirit pull together, it is easy to take this brave 
attitude towards life, to go swinging through the days, 
singing with a full and grateful heart, 

" I am the master of my fate ; 
I am the captain of my soul." 

But the test comes later, when one grows old and ill, 
when one faces death, when affairs go so stubbornly 
and disastrously that a man seems anything but the 
master of his fate. He may even seem to be the 
sport of destiny and to be paying heavily for his pre- 
vious courage and youthful pretensions. And these are 
not exceptional crises. They are snares that lie in 
wait for all of us, and put our philosophy to the ex- 
treme test. It is the high office of a complete and effi- 
cient education to prepare a man for these assured 
events, to show him that to a liberated soul there is in 
the outer world no possible disaster, that objectively 
speaking there are neither victories nor defeats, but 
that everything takes its quality from the spirit. The 
laws of Nature, the composition and properties of mat- 
ter, the essence of time and space, the stubborn necessi- 
ties of number are not walls and prisons. They are 
merely the conditions under which the game of life is 
played out, — without them, there would be no game. 
By offering their several resistances, they make the 
drama possible. Play the Game is an injunction just as 



THE QUESTION 451 

tonic, just as imperative for the old man who already 
sees the approach of the death angel as for the young man 
intoxicated with what he is pleased to call life. For the 
importance of the game does not lie with the counters, with 
the field, with the given rules, but wholly with the players 
themselves. And it would be impossible to say which 
of the two, the old man or the young man, has really 
the larger measure of life, for life is a question of the 
spirit, not of the body. When the spirit is strong, old 
age and bodily death are mere incidents in one's per- 
sonal history and are neither tragic nor important. If 
the spirit is weak, and existence is made up for the 
most part of bodily sensations and appetites, then of 
course old age and death seem all important, and both 
are tragedies. It is odd that our modern education 
which so plumes itself upon being, above everything 
else, practical should concern itself only with preparing 
boys and girls for life, and should have no word to say 
about old age and death, which are quite as inevitable. 
Death may come at any moment, and old age is coming 
all the time. Body dies, and returns its elements to the 
earth which gave it; but spirit, we believe, always has 
been and always will be. Spirit, that whole conscious- 
ness which we have seen to be reality, is the proper 
subject-matter of education; and body, the tool and 
servant of spirit, the proper subject for all knightly 
training. It is a verbal convenience to speak of the 
dualism of spirit and body, but nothing more. Spirit, 
the vehicle of life, creates body, organizes it, perfects 
it, uses it, and then at some moment ordained of the 
gods, discards it. Whether spirit has been previously 
incarnated, whether it will in the future create new 
bodies for itself, the majority of men have had no di- 



452 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

rect conscious experience and may not therefore speak 
authoritatively. But there is an increasing mass of in- 
direct testimony from widely separated and unlike 
sources which makes such a view both probable and 
logical. The feeling grows in educated circles, scientific 
as well as mystical, that immortality and rebirth are 
much more than a hope, that they represent in fact a 
substantial reality and that the enlightened spirit may 
with high suitableness regard itself as an abiding part 
of the eternal order. 

In the preceding chapters I have had little or noth- 
ing to say about social education, and have so gone 
counter to one of the popular illusions of the day. But 
it seemed to me quite unnecessary, for we have nowhere 
the spectacle of the solitary child or the solitary man. 
We have, of course, such an abstraction in our imagin- 
ative literature, in the Robinson Crusoes of both edu- 
cational and economic treatises, but we do not find them 
in flesh and blood. Nature has ordained that every 
child shall have two parents, and that under normal 
conditions it shall pass its earlier years in the protection 
of family life. Variation and companionship are thus 
provided for. The circumstances of our religious, indus- 
trial, and political life have led to intimate human asso- 
ciation, and have created a social environment into 
which practically all men are born, in which they live 
and earn their daily bread, and from which they have 
neither the power nor the more than temporary desire 
to escape. This social environment is made up of hu- 
man institutions fashioned by mankind just as it has 
fashioned all other human tools, to satisfy recognized 
human wants. The attempt to erect this environment 
into something apart from man, as something causative, 



THE QUESTION 453 

and to treat it as a "social organism,", with specific 
qualities and powers, seems to me a bit of very empty 
phrase-making, and productive of far more confusion 
than enlightenment. Society is a mechanical mixture, 
not a chemical compound, and can display no quality 
which does not reside as such in the individual com- 
ponents. As men advance in development, they grow' 
more social because they grow more intelligent; they 
recognize increasingly the pleasure and profit in human I 
solidarity. With each passing year it is seen with ever 
greater clearness that an injury to one is an injury to 
all. Education is the unfolding and perfecting of the 
human spirit. But the attempt to read into society a 
life independent of its members, and to discover phe- 
nomena manifested by the group as such, but not dis- 
coverable in the individuals themselves seems to me 
a barren and misleading undertaking. Education pro- 
duces social results of the utmost attainable value, but 
they are summaries of individual results, not separate | 
group results. In both aim and method, education deals 
and must deal with individual units. When education 
deals wisely and efficiently, the total result is good. 
But whatever the quality of the total result it is pre- 
cisely the same in kind and degree as the average re- 
sult achieved in the individual consciousness. To go 
outside of this consciousness into that vague summary 
which we call society, is to chase a mirage and lose 
sight of reality. The current schemes of social educa- 
tion, and the current belief in the fetish of a social 
organism both rest, it seems to me, upon our growing / 
habit of turning away from the palpitating, immediate 
integrity of consciousness to the lifeless desert of sym- 
bol and metaphor. Every educational revival, like 



454 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

every true religious revival, is a return to immediacy, 
to the whole content of the present moment. It is the 
abandonment of lifeless forms and symbols and the re- 
turn to a living, immediate reality. 

There are perhaps two reasons why I have spoken 
almost inevitably about the education of boys at greater 
length than about the education of boys and girls. One 
reason is purely verbal. It is that we have no pronoun 
which refers to both sexes. One must say either " their " 
or must resort to the awkwardness of " his or her." The 
second reason is personal. It is that my own teaching 
experience has been almost wholly limited to boys, and 
I am able to speak about them with greater assurance 
and knowledge. But while the details of education dif- 
fer for boys and girls, the same general principles apply 
to both. Practically everything I have said may with 
reasonable adaptation be applied to girls as well as to 
boys. It seems to me that from one point of view girls 
need less education than boys, and from another point 
of view, they need more. They need less, because women 
have more natural wit than men. An" ignorant " woman 
often displays greater sagacity than a " wise " man. They 
need more, because they are the mothers of the coming 
generation. 

I have allowed myself an interrogative title, and I 
have done this because, in spite of its undesirable length 
and its admitted clumsiness, it expresses as nothing 
else can the precise scope of my inquiry, — What is it 
to be educated ? I have kept this question in mind in 
every chapter, and I have especially tried to remember 
that I am always asking a question and at the most 
only suggesting an answer. I can conceive of no more 



THE QUESTION 455 

important question, for if asked in the thoroughgoing 
fashion that I have here tried to ask it, it goes to the 
very depths of our being, inquires what we are, what 
we believe, what we are doing, what we think we know, 
what we venture to hope for. And the very inclusive- 
ness of the question indicates what we have in many 
chapters been trying to point out, that education and 
personal salvation are one and the same thing. The 
difficult but comforting path which leads in the direc- 
tion of right reason and enlightenment also leads to the 
gods. I am far from thinking that I have been able to 
answer this august question of what it is to be educated, 
or even from believing that it can ever be answered 
with any degree of finality. The question ought to mean 
more, and it ought to require a more profound answer 
at the hands of each succeeding generation. An edu- 
cated man is only educated up to to-day. It is a major 
art to become educated. It is no less of an art to re- 
main educated. Both require ceaseless spiritual activity, 
that is to say, both require creative life. But while one 
may not hope to offer any ultimate answer, it is clear, 
I think, from the partial and incomplete answer already 
offered, that any genuine education demands as its first 
requisite an essential harmony in the inner life, and 
then, as soon as may be, a similar harmony between this 
inner life and one's outer acts, between spirit and body. 
This requisite and essential harmony can only be 
achieved when in all the activities of the day we cease 
to hold antagonistic and contradictory views, and learn 
to live in the present moment with our whole conscious- 
ness, our whole self. It is in the abounding life of the 
spirit, in its integrity and immediacy, that we must seek 
the source of all true and abiding culture. It is in the 



< 



456 WHAT IS IT TO BE EDUCATED? 

wholesome life of the disciplined body that we may find 
the major materials for our thinking, and the appointed 
theater for social intercourse and service. 

Life offers but one condition, activity, — ceaseless, 
contemporary, creative activity. Each day the soul 
stands face to face with a wealth of possible experience 
so varied, so inexhaustible, so magnificent that the 
pulse beats with a divine excitement, and existence itself 
becomes a high adventure. To live in the spirit, to iden- 
tify one's self with life, with eager, pulsating, abundant 
life, — this is to be educated. It is to live eternally. I 
say it reverently, — it is to know God. 



THE END 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 



The following list includes some of the books that 
have been read, in whole or in part, while my own book 
was incubating ; and to many of them I feel a genuine 
indebtedness. Those marked with a star (*) are partic- 
ularly recommended to the reader. 

*The Light of Asia. 
All ; but especially — 

* Culture and Anarchy. 
^Literature and Dogma. 
*Essays in Criticism. 
The New Laocobn. 
Literature and the American Col' 

lege. 

* Creative Evolution. 
^Introduction to Metaphysics. 
Matter and Memory. 
Laughter. 



Sir Edwin Arnold 
Matthew Arnold 



Irving Babbitt 
Henri Bergson 



*The Bhagavad-Gita. 
*The Bible 

W. C. Brownell 

*Robert Browning 
Thomas Carlyle 
Edward Carpenter 



G. K. Chesterton 
Jas. Freeman Clarke 
Charles Darwin 



T. W. Rhys Davids 



All, but especially the Gospel of 
St. Matthew. 

* American Prose Masters. 
French Traits. 

All. 

All. 

*The Art of Creation. 

Civilization : Its Cause and Cure. 

England's Ideals. 

Towards Democracy. 

What 's Wrong with the World f 

*Ten Great Religions. 

All ; but especially — 

* Descent of Man. 

* Origin of Species. 

* Buddhism. 



460 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 



Hugh S. R. Elliot 

*Ralph Waldo Emerson 
Rudolf Eucken 
Charles Ferguson 
D. C. Fisher 
John Fiske 

Anatole France 
Friedrich Frobel 
John Galsworthy 

Francis Galton 

Henry George 

C. P. Gilman 
Ernst Haeckel 

Daniel Halevy 
H. Fielding Hall 
William W. Hastings 

Lafcadio Hearn 

Archibald Henderson 
C. Han ford Henderson 



Henrik Ibsen 



* William James 
R. M. Johnston 
Charles Francis Keary 
Irving King 
The Koran 
Paul Kropotkin 



Modern Science and the Illusions 

of Prof. Bergson. 
All. 

*The Life of the Spirit. 

. The University Militant. 

A Montessori Mother. 

*The Destiny of Man. 

* The Idea of God. 
Ulle des Pingouins. 
*The Education of Man. 
^Justice. 

The Inn of Tranquillity. 
*An Inquiry into Human Faculty. 
Heredity. 

^Progress and Poverty. 
A Perplexed Philosopher. 
The Man-Made World. 
The Riddle of the Universe. 
? The Wonders of Life. 
Life of Nietzsche. 
*The Soul of a People. 
*A Manual for Physical Measure- 

ments. 
All ; but especially — 

* Japan : an Interpretation. 
Life of G. B. Shaw. 
^Education and the Larger Life. 
The Children of Good Fortune. 
Pay-Day. 

All ; but especially — 
*The Lady from the Sea. 
*The Wild Duck. 
*The DolVs House. 

* Ghosts. 

*An Enemy of the People. 

All. 

The Holy Christian Church. 

*The Pursuit of Reason. 

Social Ideals in Education. 

* Mutual Aid as a Factor in 

Evolution. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 



461 



Edouard Le Roy 

J. Ramsay Macdonald 
Nicolo Machiavelli 

J. W. Mackail 
*Maurice Maeterlinck 
Aylmer Maude 
Dmitri Merejkowski 
John Stuart Mill 



William Morris 

William Henry Newman 
F. W. Nietzsche 

Nivedita of Ramakrishna 

Okakura-Kakuzo 



Walter Pater 
Simon N. Patton 
A. Rabagliati 
Ernest Renan 
Josiah Royce 
*John Ruskin 
Paul Sabatier 

Olive Schreiner 
Edouard Schure' 
Henry R. Seager 

G. Bernard Shaw 



Charles Somer 
Herbert Spencer 



The New Philosophy of Henri 

Bergson. 
Syndicalism. 
*The Prince. 
Florentine History. 
*Life of William Morris. 
All. 

*Life of Tolstoy. 
* Trilogy. 
-> *A utobiography . 
*0n Liberty. 

The Subjection of Women. 
All ; but especially — 
* News from Nowhere. 
Grammar of Assent. 
*Thus Spake Zarathustra. 
The Will to Power. 
All ; but especially — 
*The Web of Indian Life. 
*The Awakening of Japan. 

* Ideals of the East. 
The Book of Tea. 
*The Renaissance. 

The New Basis of Civilization. 

*Air, Food and Exercise. 

*History of the Beni-Israel. 

*The Spirit of Modern Philosophy. 

All. 

*Life of St. Francis of Assisi. 

* Modernism. 

* Woman and Labor. 
*Les Grands Inities. 

* Principles of Economics. 
Social Insurance. 
*The Doctor's Dilemma. 
*The Showing up of Blanco 

Posnet. 
Man and Superhuman. 
Candida. 
Tolstoy. 

All ; but especially — 
*The Data of Ethics. 



462 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 



Herbert Spencer 

R. L. Stevenson 

J. Addington Symonds 

Rabindranath Tagore 

*Lyof Tolstoy 
Meredith Townsend 
John Mason Tyler 
Richard Wagner 
William Wallace 
Lester F. Ward 
H. G. Wells 



*Justice. 

*The Unknowable. 

All. 

*The Renaissance. 

*Sadhana. 

The Gardener. 

All. 

*Asia and Europe. 

* Growth and Education. 

Essays. 

Life of Schopenhauer. 

*Pure Sociology. 

*New Worlds for Old. 



CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS 
U . S . A 



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